3. Plea-Bargaining
Most criminal cases are resolved by plea bargain, where the defendant admits guilt in exchange for a reduced charge (or a lesser sentencing recommendation). Unlike the disclosure of exculpatory evidence, plea-bargaining is subject to almost zero oversight. We have argued that, in several contexts, implicit racial bias thrives in the midst of discretionary determinations. Plea-bargaining is no exception. Consider a sampling of four "factors" among those the Department of Justice instructs federal prosecutors to consult in deciding whether to pursue a bargained disposition: (1) "[T]he nature and seriousness of the offense or offenses charged"; (2) "the defendant's remorse or contrition and his willingness to assume responsibility"; (3) "the public interest in having the case tried rather than disposed of by a guilty plea"; and (4) "the expense of trial and How might the defendant's (or the victim's) race have an impact on the prosecutor's decision whether to offer a plea bargain, and if a plea is in fact offered, how much of a charging reduction will be offered in exchange for the guilty plea?
First, consider prosecutors' assessment of the "seriousness of the offense charged." Imagine a domestic violence case where a man severely abuses his spouse. Does it matter if the spouse is black? Imagine white prosecutors deciding whether to offer the suspect a plea deal on a misdemeanor battery charge. As the prosecutors attempt to quantify the seriousness of the offense, they might not be able to empathize with the fear and pain of a black woman as much as they could empathize with a white woman subjected to domestic abuse. This phenomenon is known as "in-group favoritism," which is defined as "our tendency to favor the groups we belong Justice Scalia might use the term in-group favoritism to label the "undeniable reality" he described in his dissent in Powers v. Ohio"that all groups tend to have particular sympathies ... toward their own group
There is experimental support for the existence and power of ingroup favoritism, or bias, as it relates to empathizing with a victim. Alessio Avenanti used a method called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to measure corticospinal activity level in participants who viewed short video clips of a needle entering into the hand of either a lightskinned or dark-skinned person. Consistent with the in-group empathetic-bias explanation, Avenanti found that region-specific brain activity levels were higher when Caucasian-Italian participants viewed the clip of a light-skinned participant experiencing pain than when they saw a clip of a dark-skinned target being subjected to pain. Returning to the white prosecutors trying to assess the seriousness of the domestic abuse suffered by a black woman, prosecutors might undervalue the extent of the harm caused by the abuse relative to the harm that they would consider a similarly situated white woman--perhaps someone who reminds them of their mothers, sisters, or daughters--to have suffered.
The defendant's race (as well as the victim's race) can also influence the plea-bargaining process. Imagine a prosecutor trying to determine whether to offer a defendant a plea to manslaughter (and thus a term of years) or to proceed to trial to try to obtain a second-degree murder conviction (and thus, in many jurisdictions, life without parole). Whether "the public interest" is satisfied by a plea bargain (as opposed to going to trial where the defendant could receive a harsher sentence) and whether "the expense of trial" is worth it turn on how the prosecutor views the defendant. Is this person dangerous and thus likely to commit a future crime? As a white prosecutor reviews the case file of a young white defendant, the prosecutor might be unknowingly affected by positive implicit stereotypes relating to lawfulness and trustworthiness. This could lead to a more lenient evaluation of the defendant--troubled, but not a bad person, for example--and thus a plea offer is more likely to follow. As we have well-covered by now, the opposite will be true when the prosecutor views a black defendant; the prosecutor's mind will likely trigger automatic associations between the defendant and the concepts of violence and hostility. On a related point, as the prosecutor attempts to determine the degree of remorse the defendant has displayed (for example, during plea negotiations), the stereotype that black citizens are less fully human might render the prosecutor less able to detect remorse from a defendant's body language or more likely to reject a black defendant's apology as self-serving or otherwise not genuine. So too might the stereotypes that black citizens are violent, hostile, and prone to criminality have an impact on the degree of remorse that the prosecutor is able to detect in a defendant.
