Abstract

Excerpted From: Rachel Bowman, Ojmarrh Mitchell, Daniela Oramas Mora, and Lyndsay Boggess, Race and Ethnicity in the Courtroom Workgroup: Can Diversifying the Court Solve Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Case Outcomes?, 50 Law & Hum. Behav. 482 (October 2026) (Full Document)

The legal model of court decision making presupposes that “the decisions of the court are substantially influenced by the facts of the case in light of the plain language of statutes and the Constitution, the intent of the Framers, and/or precedent” (Segal & Spaeth, 2002, p. 48). In that way, the legal model emphasizes the centrality of the rule of law in understanding legal decisions (Austin, 1874), minimizing the role of discretion and ideology (Segal & Spaeth, 2002). What is largely missing from the legal model’s conceptualization of court decisions are the psychological and social factors that influence court actors’ interpretation and application of the law in a given case (Bowman et al., 2024; George & Epstein, 1992; Tajfel & Turner, 1986). In practice, criminal case outcomes vary by a variety of extralegal factors, including the demographics of the defendant (Steffensmeier et al., 1998), the legal decision-makers on the case (Wooldredge, 2010), and the jurisdiction in which a case is processed (Beckett & Beach, 2021; Kautt, 2002). This variation emphasizes that criminal justice practitioners’ decisions involve more than a strict application of the law.

Race is one of the more heavily researched sources of variation in criminal case outcomes. Decades of research reveal disparities in which racial minorities, particularly Black individuals, tend to receive more punitive outcomes from arrest to disposition (e.g., Fagan & Davies, 2000; Kutateladze et al., 2014; Spohn, 2015). Employing racially and ethnically diverse workforces has long been offered as a means of achieving greater fairness in the criminal legal system (see Goldman, 1979; Welch et al., 1988). More than 50 years ago, the Kerner report called for police departments to more actively recruit Black individuals, asserting that Black officers would be better able to differentiate “the truly suspect from the unfamiliar” (p. 165). Seeming to draw on Gordon Allport’s conceptualization of prejudice, the report suggested that contact with Black officers would decrease racial stereotypes and prejudice among White officers (Allport, 1954; Kerner Commission, 1968). More recently, the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing (2015) expressed similar sentiments, suggesting that hiring racial minorities was a crucial factor in minimizing bias against minorities and improving the effectiveness of policing in minority communities. Parallel recommendations have been made in the context of courts. For instance, Fair and Just Prosecution (2018) called for hiring diverse workforces to create fairer prosecution practices and shift office norms. These ideas drive diversity efforts in the nation’s courts. In fact, at least 22 state courts and DC have engaged in activities designed to enhance racial/ethnic diversity among court actors (Ward, 2006).

Despite frequent calls to increase diversity as a remedy to racial/ethnic disparities, we know relatively little about how diversity of the justice workforce has impacted equity in criminal case outcomes. Psychological research on jury decision making provides significant insights into how the racial composition of juries relates to the quality of decision making and racial bias in outcomes (Peter-Hagene, 2019; Sommers, 2006). It is unclear, however, the extent to which these findings translate to the case processing decisions of the courtroom workgroup--the relevant decision-making body in the court--in which the decision-makers are educated, trained, and socialized into the legal profession (Eisenstein & Jacob, 1977; Mertz, 2007). What little research has been done on the relationship between workforce diversity and disparities in court outcomes (e.g., King et al., 2010; Ward et al., 2009) fails to account for how judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys create shared norms and expectations within their workgroup through repeated interaction on cases over time and how those norms might moderate the relationship between court actors’ social identities (e.g., race) and their decisions on cases.

The current research advances the nascent evidence base on the relationship between workgroup diversity, severity of case outcomes, and racial and ethnic disparities in defendants’ case outcomes in two distinct ways. First and foremost, we capitalize on Florida’s broad open-record laws to create a unique data set that captures case outcomes for a large random sample of felony cases adjudicated throughout the state. These data include granular information on the identities of the primary court actors involved in each case. From these data, we constructed direct measures of the racial/ethnic composition of each felony courtroom or workgroup, which is the unit of analysis that is arguably most relevant to extant theory and policy considerations. Second, we extend the research in this area by examining key pretrial decisions, in addition to the more traditional focus on sentencing outcomes. Addressing these issues advances theory on court case processing and adds empirical evidence to policy debates concerning the effects of diversity on racial/ethnic fairness.

For decades, diversifying the court workforce has been proposed as a solution to persistent racial and ethnic disparities in criminal justice outcomes. In the present study, we empirically examined the relationship between diversity and disparities--filling a gap in the extant literature by measuring the diversity of the theoretically relevant decision-making body in criminal courts: the courtroom workgroup. We found that, on average, more diverse workgroups were less punitive than more homogenously White workgroups; however, the effects of diversity on case outcomes differed between White, Black, and Hispanic defendants. While Black defendants fared somewhat better in sentencing when a larger proportion of their courtroom workgroup was from their racial ingroup, Hispanic defendants actually fared somewhat worse. This suggests that diversity alone may not transform the current state of the criminal justice system and highlights the importance of differentiating between race and ethnicity when examining the effects of diversity on decision making. Our findings also made clear, however, that courtroom workgroups in Florida are predominantly White. In the American criminal justice system, court actors (viz., judges and prosecutors) hold significant power and discretion. While additional research is needed to better understand the effects of social identity on punishment in the context of the courtroom workgroup, ensuring full access to these positions of power is important so that decision-making authority is more fairly distributed in society.