Sports fandom is a powerful force, and it seems even judges aren’t immune from its effects.
In a study titled “Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles,” Ozkan Eren and Naci Mocan, researches at the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that after LSU football suffered an upset loss, judges in Louisiana routinely doled out harsher sentences to juveniles.
These longer sentences disproportionately impacted black offenders.
Black juveniles received an extra 46 days of sentencing after an unexpected loss, an increase of almost nine percent. Meanwhile, white juveniles received an additional eight days.
The correlation was even stronger if the judge received an undergraduate degree from LSU. In that case, the sentences were 74 days longer than usual.