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Judges who were appointed by Republican presidents hand out longer jail sentences to black people than to white people, according to a new study.
The study was conducted by two Harvard Law School professors using data from over half a million defendants, reports WRAL. The researchers looked at the sentencing habits of around 1400 judges over 15 years using information from databases including the Federal Judicial Center, the U.S. Sentencing Commission and the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. The study also broke sentencing down by gender.
“Republican-appointed judges sentence black defendants to three more months than similar non-blacks and female defendants to two fewer months than similar males compared to Democratic-appointed judges,” the study concluded. “These differences cannot be explained by other judge characteristics and grow substantially larger when judges are granted more discretion.”
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