Equal justice under law? Prosecutor demographics and the death penalty

Abstract

Prior research has established that crime victims’ and defendants’ demographic traits affect the sentence that criminal defendants receive. In addition, previous studies have found that judges’ and juries’ biases affect the outcomes in criminal cases. Yet, despite significant scholarly attention to the effect of race and gender on criminal sentencing, no previous study has explored whether prosecutors’ demographic traits influence the outcome of criminal cases. This is surprising, given that prosecutors are responsible for determining what crimes defendants are charged with and whether to pursue the death penalty in eligible cases. Here, we utilize data on federal death penalty-eligible cases and the prosecutors who tried those cases to explore whether federal prosecutors’ demographic traits have an effect on whether the death penalty is imposed. We find that both race and gender have statistically significant effects on whether a defendant receives the death penalty, even when case-specific effects including victim and defendant characteristics are controlled for.