Discrimination in the Sentencing: Showing Remorse and the Intersection of Race and Gender

• In Event: 4144 - Emerging Frontiers in Research on Discrimination

Abstract

A significant body of sociological scholarship has documented the structural causes of racial inequality in mass incarceration, yet fewer studies investigate discriminatory behaviors by jurors and judges inside the courtroom. In this paper, we examine the role of showing remorse in jurors’ decision-making process and argue that jurors’ biased empathetic responses serve as an underexplored mechanism driving sentencing discrimination. Drawing on an experimental test of 1,155 respondents in a mock criminal trial, we find that when information about offenders’ race (black or white) and gender (female or male) were not presented to the jurors, sentence rulings were consistent and unaffected by offenders’ expression of remorse. However, when offenders’ demographic characteristics become salient, jurors rewarded all but black men for showing remorse, assigning significantly lighter sentences to remorseful perpetrators than their emotion-less counterparts. We further demonstrate that jurors’ uneven distribution of sympathy was driven by their greater engagement with emotions expressed by whites than by blacks. Our study
provides experimental evident that the demonstrative power of emotions is contingent upon complex social conditions, and that privilege and disadvantages in claiming emotion authenticity and legitimacy in the penal system may contribute to discrimination in sentencing.

Authors

• Jun Zhao, Georgia State University

• Christabel L. Rogalin, Purdue University Northwest