Race and ethnicity in the courtroom workgroup: Can diversifying the court solve racial and ethnic disparities in case outcomes?

Abstract

Objective: Racial and ethnic disparities in criminal court outcomes in the United States are a persistent problem, one that is often attributed to the considerable discretion court actors have in determining whether, and to what extent, to punish criminal defendants. To reduce unwarranted disparities and overzealous sanctioning in U.S. courts, many have called for increasing the diversity of the court workforce. This article empirically examines the effects of workgroup diversity on court outcomes.

Hypotheses: We hypothesize that more racially and ethnically diverse courtroom workgroups will (a) be less punitive overall and (b) produce smaller racial and ethnic disparities in case outcomes.

Method: Using a sample of felony cases processed in Florida's Circuit Courts in 2017 (N = 10,202), we estimated a direct and interactive multinomial logistic regression model of pretrial and sentencing outcomes (case declination, diversion, transfer, withhold adjudication, probation, jail, and prison) with clustered standard errors to account for the nested nature of the data.

Results: We found that, although the majority of routine court actors in our sample were White, there was variation in case outcomes by workgroup diversity with more racially and ethnically diverse workgroups being, on average, less punitive than more homogenously White workgroups. However, the relationship between workgroup diversity and the severity of pretrial and sentencing outcomes operated differently for Black and Hispanic defendants. While Hispanic defendants tended to fare worse-in probation and jail decisions-in workgroups with a larger proportion of Hispanic court actors, Black defendants were more likely to be spared prison time in workgroups with a larger proportion of Black court actors.

Conclusions: Our findings highlight the importance of disentangling race from ethnicity in understanding the impact of workgroup diversity on criminal case outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).