Individual Court Actors and Their Collaborations: A Social Network Analysis of Initial Appearance Decisions

• In Event: Pretrial Supervision

Abstract

At initial appearances, judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys negotiate the terms of a defendants’ release or detention pending their case disposition. However, there is limited information about the extent to which individual court actors contribute to these decisions, even though there may be differences in court actors’ abilities to make persuasive arguments or biases towards particular actors’ arguments. To this end, we examined how court actors individually and collaboratively influence initial appearance outcomes using a set of virtual initial appearance hearings during the COVID-19 pandemic in the summer of 2021. First, focusing on individual contributions, we use Multiple Regression Quadratic Assignment Procedures (MRQAP) and construct three separate networks for judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys that included cases as nodes and specific court actors as the ties between the cases. Then, in recognition of collaborative efforts, we constructed dyadic networks (e.g., prosecutor-defense attorney dyads) and assessed how specific combinations of court actors created decisions using MRQAP. Results highlighted the salience of individual court actors and their collaborations at the initial appearance stage.

Authors

• Ashley Elizabeth Rodriguez, The Pennsylvania State University

• Christi Metcalfe, University of South Carolina