As if there weren't already enough known injustices within the criminal justice system, a new study has found that judges in juvenile courts issue harsher sentences after their local football team loses. The working paper that details the results, "Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles," published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that juvenile court judges regularly dish out longer sentences following a loss by the Louisiana State University Tigers football team.
The working paper, authored by Louisiana State University professors Ozkan Eren and Naci Mocan, found that a loss of a favorite team can influence a judge's sentencing habits for up to a week after the team loses. For the study, Eren and Mocan looked through the decisions given by Louisiana juvenile court judges between 1996 and 2012, finding that the judges regularly handed down harsher sentences after the Tigers lost a game.
Specifically, when it was a big game, or when Louisiana was expected to win, judges would give harsher sentences. But the study also found that judges' sentencing habits did not seem to change if the win was expected or if there was a close loss for a low-stakes game.
While it's bad enough that the judges seemed to allow the loss of a football team to influence the sentences they handed down, Eren and Mocan also found that the judges disproportionately gave harsher sentences to black youths.
Eren and Mocan say in the paper that the judges are not intentionally giving out longer sentences following losses. Rather, Eren and Mocan said the judges were in a state of "emotional shock" and made harsher sentencing decisions in this altered state of mind. Emotional shock over a college football game or not, young peoples' lives have been impacted.
