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| Publications [#42275] of Renzo A. Massari
Working Papers
- R.A. Massari, Racial and Ethnic Discrimination in State Processing and Sentencing of Murder Cases
(Fall, 2005) [pdf]
(last updated on 2005/11/03)
Abstract:
This paper studies the effect of racial and
ethnic discrimination in state processing and
sentencing of murder cases. I first show why
models that do not account for the
combination of the defendant's and the
victim's race fail to find significant
effects. I then show that, despite missing
socioeconomic controls and the potential
endogeneity of previous criminal record, a
model can be specified so that its estimators
capture the effects of race left unexplained
by legally-relevant dimensions in such a way
that they bound racial discrimination from
above. Specifically, the estimates are an
aggregate of racial discrimination in justice
and the effect of socioeconomic disparities
correlated to race, all operating in the
same direction. I find that cases with black
defendants and white victims are 11.5
percentage points more likely to end in a
guilty outcome and result in 50% longer
sentences than cases with white
defendants and black victims. Cases with
Hispanic defendants and white victims are 8.8
percentage points more likely to end in a
guilty outcome than those with white
defendants and Hispanic victims, but there is
no significant difference on sentence length.
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