Partisan Punishment: How Judicial Political Affiliation Influences the Sentencing of Domestic Terrorists

• In Event: Bias and Inequality in Sentencing

Abstract

When it comes to criminal sentencing, the accepted consensus is that legal variables cannot fully explain the outcomes. It has also been established that individuals have more punitive attitudes toward political adversaries who break the law than towards those on their own side. Moreover, research has found sentencing disparities based on the ideology of domestic terrorists. Political bias, while ubiquitous in society, is yet to be explored as an extralegal factor in sentencing. This study seeks to fill this gap by empirically examining if the political affiliation of federal judges contributes to unwarranted variation in the punishment of domestic terrorists based on their ideology. Drawing on Attribution Theory, Social Identity Theory, and Focal Concerns Theory, this study uses two approaches. First, multivariate regression will be used to analyze a dataset of federal domestic terrorist-related criminal cases from the 1980s to present day, testing the interaction between judicial partisan affiliation and defendant ideology on sentencing outcomes. Second, a linguistic analysis of judicial remarks in the sentencing hearings of these cases will be analyzed by LIWC software to examine differences in psychological, emotional and attitudinal content.

Author

• James Bacigalupo, University of Massachusetts Lowell