I'm doing a bunch of workshopping of this piece over the summer @lawandsociety.bsky.social, the Richmond Junior Faculty Forum, and the Harvard/Yale/Stanford Junior Faculty Forum. Would love to hear your thoughts & reactions!

3) individual attorneys vary strongly in the effectiveness of their presentations, and certain classes of attorneys (largely CJA panel-appointed attorneys) present less mitigation than others.

2) But certain other things that correlate with race do seem to seem to affect mitigation presentations. The big one: attorneys representing detained defendants (who are disproportionately people of color) present less mitigation for those defendants.

Here, I report new results examining whether criminal defendants benefit equally from mitigation, or whether it helps certain defendants disproportionately. The key takeaways:
1) For the most part, I do not find evidence that race has a substantial impact on the effectiveness of mitigation

Very fortunately, I was able to partner with the U.S. Sentencing Commission, who graciously agreed to share some of their data connected to the defendants in my hand-coded dataset. Through that, I'm able to control for many more things that might related to mitigation (such as race or education).

But because all of my data were gathered from publicly available sources, I didn't know much about the defendants in the cases that I studied. I couldn't answer some important questions, such as whether white defendant benefited disproportionately from mitigation compared to others.

In some prior work, I showed that as attorneys present more of this "personal" mitigation about the defendant, sentences tend to decrease, even when controlling for things like sentence severity.

For the past few years, I've been working on a series of papers examining whether background mitigation about a criminal defendant's past (e.g., evidence of a traumatic upbringing or a history of mental illness) relates to sentences ultimately imposed in federal cases.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Yeah, though mine just came back on.