Federal judges who once worked as public defenders send fewer people to prison. Across more than 740,000 federal charges, defendants who landed in front of a former public defender were up to 2.5 percentage points less likely to be incarcerated, and those convicted at trial got sentences about 16 months shorter.
The research is by Allison P. Harris of Yale University and Maya Sen of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. It appeared online on December 20, 2024, and in the January 2026 issue of The Journal of Politics (read the paper).
Ten years of federal sentences
The authors used records of federal criminal charges heard from January 1, 2010, to December 31, 2019, obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse through repeated public records requests. After keeping only charges handled by federal district judges, they had 740,786 charges decided by 1,381 judges.
They matched those charges to judges’ biographies from the Federal Judicial Center. Among district judges appointed since 1960, 5.2% had public defender experience, compared with 42.3% who had been prosecutors. Former public defenders were more common among Democratic appointees (8.1%) than Republican ones (2.6%).
Because cases within a district are assigned to judges essentially at random, the authors compared outcomes within the same court, year and month. Their models also accounted for judges’ gender, race, appointing president, years on the bench, and other legal experience, including work as a prosecutor or private defense lawyer.
Less prison, and fewer extreme sentences
Across all charges, being assigned a former public defender cut the chance of an incarceration sentence by up to 2.5 percentage points, and made probation or community service more likely. The pattern held whether the judge was appointed by a Democrat or a Republican, with suggestive signs that the effect was stronger among Republican appointees. It also survived controls for detailed measures of judicial ideology.
Sentence length differed mainly in cases that went to trial, where judges have more discretion. There, defendants before a former public defender received sentences around 16 months shorter. For pleas, which make up most federal cases, there was no significant difference.
Part of that gap comes from the extreme end. In trial cases, former public defenders were about one percentage point less likely to hand down sentences of more than 70 or more than 100 years. The data held 361 sentences longer than 100 years and 14 longer than 1,000 years.
Judges who spent more years as public defenders were less punitive still, which the authors read as evidence of learning on the job. Private criminal defense experience showed a similar but weaker relationship.
A new lever for presidents
Harris and Sen acknowledge that lawyers with more lenient views on punishment may choose public defense in the first place, though they present evidence that this is not the whole story. Either way, they argue, the result gives politicians a new way to shape policy through the courts: choosing judges by their previous jobs, not only their ideology.
They note that out of President Biden’s first 42 judicial nominees, a third had public criminal defense experience, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. By the authors’ estimate, even a modest shift toward such appointments would mean thousands fewer incarceration sentences each year.
Study Details:
- Title: How Judges’ Professional Experience Impacts Case Outcomes: An Examination of Public Defenders and Criminal Sentencing
- Authors: Allison P. Harris, Maya Sen
- Journal: The Journal of Politics
- Publication Date: December 20, 2024
- DOI: 10.1086/734532