Minority Salience and Criminal Justice Decisions

Decision-makers can exhibit biases when they overemphasize particularly salient features under limited attention. We exploit a sudden salience shock involving individuals of Moroccan descent to examine biases within the Dutch criminal justice system. The salience shock concerned the assassination of a defense attorney by organized crime and thus specifically targeted the justice system. Leveraging high-quality data covering arrest through appeal, we find no impact on police or prosecutor decisions but uncover a 71 percent increase in sentence lengths imposed by judges on salient individuals. Heterogeneity analyses suggest that judge experience with minority suspects can mitigate bias in more discretionary decisions. (JEL D91, J15, K42)