Academic

Gordon on Bias in Federal Public Corruption Prosecutions

By Lawrence Solum

Sanford C. Gordon (New York University - Department of Politics) has posted Assessing Partisan Bias in Federal Public Corruption Prosecutions on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

The 2007 U.S. Attorney firing scandal has raised the specter of political bias in the prosecution of officials under federal corruption laws. Has prosecutorial discretion been employed to persecute enemies or shield allies? To answer this question, I develop a model of the interaction between officials deciding whether to engage in corruption and a prosecutor deciding whether to pursue cases against them. Biased prosecutors will be willing to file weaker cases against political opponents than against allies. Consequently, the model anticipates that in the presence of partisan bias, sentences of prosecuted opponents will tend to be lower than those of co-partisans. Employing newly collected data on public corruption prosecutions, I find evidence of partisan bias under both the Bush and Clinton Justice Departments. However, additional analysis suggests that these results may understate the extent of bias under Bush, while overstating it under Clinton.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on October 09, 2008 (boomark / email).