By Yunica Jiang, ‘20 (PDF Version)
I. Introduction
Commenting on Judge Persky’s six-month sentence for Brock Turner, Chanel Miller—known previously to the world as the victim “Emily Doe”—poses a question: “Instead of a nineteen-year-old Stanford athlete, let’s imagine a Hispanic nineteen-year-old working in the kitchen of the fraternity commits the same crime. Does this story end differently?”[1] All actors involved in an eventual sentencing decision are susceptible to cognitive biases, from the police who make the initial arrest[2] to the prosecutor that brings the charges,[3] to the jurors.[4] Judges are susceptible to the same cognitive errors as all other actors.[5] This Article explores cognitive biases in the context of judicial decisions, with a focus on racial disparities.