We also interviewed three attorneys, a parole panel judge, and five personnel at Israeli Prison Services and Court Management, learning that case ordering is not random and that several factors contribute to the downward trend in prisoner success between meal breaks. The most important is that the board tries to complete all cases from one prison before it takes a break and to start with another prison after the break. Within each session, unrepresented prisoners usually go last and are less likely to be granted parole than prisoners with attorneys. Using the same decision rules as Danziger et al., our data indicate that unrepresented prisoners account for about one-third of all cases, but they prevail only 15% of the time, whereas prisoners with counsel prevail at a 35% rate
Glöckner’s analysis doesn’t prove that extraneous factors weren’t influencing the judges, but he shows how the same effect could be produced by entirely rational judges interacting with the protocols required by the legal system.
The main analysis works like this: we know that favourable rulings take longer than unfavourable ones (~7 mins vs ~5 mins), and we assume that judges are able to guess how long a case will take to rule on before they begin it (from clues like the thickness of the file, the types of request made, the representation the prisoner has and so on). Finally, we assume judges have a time limit in mind for each of the three sessions of the day, and will avoid starting cases which they estimate will overrun the time limit for the current session.
It turns out that this kind of rational time-management is sufficient to generate the drops in favourable outcomes.
I’ve found two critiques of this study:
1. https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/108/42/E833.full.pdf
2. https://mindhacks.com/2016/12/08/rational-judges-not-extraneous-factors-in-decisions/