“Racial, Gender Disparities and Prosecutorial Discretion: Evidence from Blakely v. Washington“

The title of this post is the title of this paper I just recently saw on SSRN that is authored by Andy Yuan and Spencer Cooper. Here is its abstract:

We investigate the causal effects of restricting prosecutorial discretion on racial and gender disparities.  Blakely v.Washington, 542 U.S. 296 (2004) exogenously introduced a significant constraint on North Carolina state prosecutors’ discretion in seeking sentence enhancements by raising their burdens of proof from “preponderance of evidence” to “beyond a reasonable doubt.”   Through a regression discontinuity design, we find striking evidence that restricting prosecutorial discretion eliminated the entire preexisting gender gap of men being 28% more likely to receive sentence enhancements than women.  However, we find no evidence suggesting a racial gap of sentence enhancements both pre and post Blakely.