But there’s another piece to this that hasn’t been detailed until now: Judges nominated by Republican presidents give black defendants harsher sentences. An exhaustive new Harvard study analyzed data on more than half a million defendants and about 1,400 U.S. district court judges over 15 years. It found that, compared with Democrat-nominated judges, GOP-nominated judges sentence black defendants to three more months than nonblack defendants for similar crimes. It’s too early to tell what effect, if any, President Donald Trump’s judges are having on racial disparities in sentencing. “Trump’s judicial nominees in particular are demonstrating what we see as a breathtaking hostility toward equal rights,” said Todd Cox, director of policy at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Source: Huffington Post June 05, 2018 20:15 UTC