Authors of provocative paper retract judge-specific claims about “most discriminatory” federal sentencing judges
I expressed concerns in this post last month about a new empirical paper making claims regarding the “most discriminatory” federal sentencing judges under the title “The Most Discriminatory Federal Judges Give Black and Hispanic Defendants At Least Double the Sentences of White Defendants.” In addition to articulating some first-cut concerns in my initial post, I also solicited and published here an extended post by Prof. Jonah Gelbach about the work based on this Twitter thread criticizing the paper.
This new Twitter thread by one of the authors reports that the paper has now been revised to remove judge-specific claims as to the “most discriminatory” sentencing judges, and it is now re-titled “Racial Disparities in Criminal Sentencing Vary Considerably across Federal Judges.” This new New Jersey Law Journal article, headlined “Backpedaling: Authors of Study on Racist Rulings Retract Their Claims Against Pennsylvania, New Jersey Judges,” provides some more details:
The authors of a study that accused some federal judges of extreme racial and ethnic bias in sentencing have withdrawn their conclusions about specific jurists following criticism of their methodology.
An earlier version of the study, published in July by the Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity, said two Eastern District of Pennsylvania judges and one from New Jersey give Black and Hispanic defendants sentences that are twice as long as those they give to whites.
But a revised version of the study, posted Tuesday, asks readers to disregard the references to specific judges…. “A previous version of this work included estimates on individually identified judges. Thanks to helpful feedback, we no longer place enough credence in judge-specific estimates to make sufficiently confident statements on any individual judge. We encourage others not to rely upon results from earlier versions of this work,” the revised version of the study said.
The study’s lead author, Christian Michael Smith, explained on Twitter that, “while our initial paper appreciated how random chance, systematic missing data patterns, and/or hidden structural factors for sentencing could affect judge rankings, we now regard the following possibility as less remote than we initially regarded it: that a judge who is actually unproblematic could end up on the extreme end of our discrimination estimates, due to random chance, systematic missing data patterns, and/or hidden structural factors for sentencing.”…
Gelbach, in an email, said of the retraction, ”I applaud the authors for removing the ranking of judges’ sentencing practices and for making clear that people should not rely on those rankings. Given the data limitations, that was the right decision for them to make.”
Prior related posts: