To the Best of My Abilities and Understanding: Do Legal Credentials Affect Sentencing Decisions in South Carolina?

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: This thesis considers the impact of legal credentialing on judicial sentencing behavior. In particular, the paper examines whether the lawyers appointed as judges to South Carolina’s Magistrate Court make different criminal sentencing decisions than the non-lawyers who serve as judges on the same court. To answer this question, the study uses a novel data set containing all publicly available criminal sentences handed down by the Magistrate Court in 2021 and cross-referenced the sentences with a roster of magistrate judges created through formal public information requests to the South Carolina Judicial System. The analysis also controls for other explanatory variables, including race and sex of the defendant, race and sex of the judge, and the crime committed. This paper finds that lawyer and non-lawyer magistrate judges impose similar sentences in nearly all respects. However, they differ along two important dimensions: racial bias (lawyer magistrate judges give Black defendants 22% greater fines than they give White defendants, while non-lawyer magistrate judges treat the groups similarly), and observance of a “plea premium” norm (lawyer magistrate judges give defendants who plead guilty 16% lower fines, while non-lawyer magistrate judges do not).

Author	Casey, Sean
Advisor	Donohue, John

DOI	https://doi.org/10.25740/vp974ty5383
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/vp974ty5383

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).

Preferred citation: Casey, S. (2023). To the Best of My Abilities and Understanding: Do Legal Credentials Affect Sentencing Decisions in South Carolina? Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/vp974ty5383. https://doi.org/10.25740/vp974ty5383.

Stanford University, Department of Economics, Honors Theses

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