Presidential Appointments, Sentencing Discretion, and Ethnoracial Disparities in U.S. Federal Courts

Presidentially-appointed federal district court judges exercise broad discretion in determining criminal sentences, directly affecting individuals and communities in the United States. Against a backdrop of longstanding ethnoracial inequities in our courts, the judiciary’s practice of redacting judge names from public data obstructs analysis of individual judges and groups, leaving key questions about these inequities unanswered. To overcome this barrier, we reconstruct judge identifiers for over 137,000 federal sentences (2018–2023), creating the first dataset to include Trump appointees’ sentencing records. We use this data to examine the relationships between presidential appointment, defendant race/ethnicity, and judicial discretion. We find Trump appointees are the least likely to grant leniency across ethnoracial groups, and ethnoracial disparities vary substantially among presidential cohorts in ways that can transcend political party. These findings highlight the importance of transparency and reform to ensure equal justice.