Experts in Crime: The Effect of an Exclusively Criminal Docket on Judicial Behavior

Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association

Explaining the imposition of the death penalty has been a major concern of political, sociological and legal scholars for several decades. Many of the explanations in political science have focused on how institutional rules, particularly rules for staying on the court, have affected the decisions of appellate judges in death penalty cases. Here we propose that a previously unexplored institutional rule, the subject matter of a court’s docket, explains a good deal of the variation in judicial behavior in death penalty cases. Using genetic matching techniques and controlling for factors commonly thought to influence judicial decision making in state supreme courts, we show that judges on state supreme courts with exclusively criminal dockets behave differently than their do their colleagues. We explore the causal mechanisms by which docket exclusivity will cause these differences in behavior.