Were hundreds of criminals given the wrong sentences because lawyers messed up a basic work sheet?
In early 2005, Emily Owens was halfway through her Ph.D. thesis in economics at the University of Maryland. Her topic: the deterrence effect of long prison sentences. She had just received data from the Maryland State Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy on tens of thousands of cases that had appeared in the state’s courts over the previous years, cases she hoped would help her close out her dissertation. But as she started working through the numbers, she came across thousands of inconsistencies and errors in the sentencing recommendations provided to judges.* The errors ultimately translated into extra months and years of prison time for unlucky convicts and light sentences for lucky ones. What might have been a run of the mill economic analysis of crime and punishment turned into a shocking account of human error.
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- Were hundreds of criminals given the wrong sentences because lawyers messed up a basic work sheet?
