Racial Disparities in Legal Outcomes

Abstract

Life-altering decisions are made every day in the legal world. Police officers make split-second judgments about whether an individual poses a threat. Prosecutors sort through conflicting accounts of an event in determining whether to charge a suspect. Juries try to reconcile complex evidence in criminal trials and render a unanimous verdict. These decisions often hinge on interpretations of subjective, ambiguous information. Besides being difficult, these decisions are also ripe with the potential for bias, despite their high-stakes nature. The present article focuses on one potential bias, racial disparity in legal outcomes. Here, “bias” refers not just to intentional discrimination or decisions based on overt prejudice (although, of course, as for everyone, some police officers, attorneys, judges, and jurors likely hold conscious prejudices and act on them). Rather, our review of the behavioral science research literature indicates that unconscious—or implicit—racial biases also taint legal decision making. Specifically, this review examines the influence of race on (a) policing, (b) charging decisions, and (c) criminal trial outcomes. Policy interventions include bias training, increasing institutional diversity, and empirically documenting the disparities’ scope. Addressing these disparities also requires acknowledging that all of us, regardless of personal ideology or professional oath, are susceptible to such biases, even when making life-and-death decisions.