Judicial decision making: An analysis of county level judicial decisions regarding indigent individuals

Decisions in the criminal justice system are made by all sorts of individuals. The most noteworthy and instrumental decision maker is the judge in the courtroom. This study examined some of the decisions made by judges. Specifically, pretrial release decisions regarding the setting of bail among indigent defendants for various types of charges and for various ethnicities/races were considered. Archival data for indigent defendants (N = 683) from one central California county were collected and analyzed with regard to the amount of bail set for the aforementioned variables.;The analyses supported most of the expected effects that certain ethnicities/races received higher bail amounts than others and that certain types of crimes received higher bail amounts than others. The analyses revealed that African- American indigent defendants received higher bail amounts than their Hispanic and white counterparts. No other differences in ethnicity were observed. The analyses used to assess bail amount and offense type revealed that those charged with assault-related crimes received the highest bail amounts while those charged with fraud-related crimes received the lowest bail amounts. A clear delineation of bail amounts were apparent based upon the analyses. While assault-related crimes received the highest bail amounts, theft-related crimes received the next highest; drug-related crimes received the next highest and fraud-related crimes received the lowest bail amounts.;Implications and limitations of the study were considered such that the current study should be applied with caution. One implication of this research is that courtrooms may be allowing judges complete discretion over pretrial release decisions without monitoring for subtle bias against certain ethnicities/races. Similarly, there may be other characteristics of individuals which also are causing a bias against them such as religious views, socio-economic status, sex and age.