Who’s On Your Case? An Examination of Pennsylvania Courtroom Workgroups
Research Poster Social & Behavioral Sciences 2025 Graduate ExhibitionPresentation by Joseph Risi
Copresented by Ashley Rodriguez
Exhibition Number 42
Abstract
Although judges make final courtroom decisions, they do not make courtroom decisions in a vacuum; they collaborate with prosecutors and defense attorneys. The courtroom work group perspective elaborates on how outcomes of criminal courts are group processes affected by the patterned interactions among group members and specifically on how courtroom outcomes are the result of these interactions between group members. As a result, courtroom outcomes are not easily attributable to the discretion of any one single individual actor. While recent sentencing research acknowledges the importance of conceptualizing courtrooms as networked work groups, there are still gaps in our understanding of how courtroom work groups affect case outcomes. We propose to use publicly available data from the Pennsylvania Unified Judicial Web Portal (PUJWP) to understand how much of the variance in first-court appearance outcomes is attributable to each individual courtroom actor as well as different networked configurations of these actors. Methodologically, we plan on estimating cross-classified multilevel models with random effects for each judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney as well as each possible dyad and triad of courtroom actors. By examining how much the variance changes when different configurations of courtroom actors is modeled, we will be able to better understand which courtroom actors (or configuration of courtroom actors) are most important.
Importance
The purpose of this study is to examine how courtroom work groups make first court appearance decisions. Courtroom work groups consist of a judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney who must work together collaboratively to decide how to release a defendant pending their case disposition. Our research aims to address two main gaps in prior research. First, most prior research assumes the judge is the dominant courtroom actor driving decision making whereas we hypothesize that prosecutors are actually the most important court room actors. Second, there has been very little prior research into what factors influence first court appearance outcomes. We aim to understand how variables like race and prior criminal history affect outcomes for defendants.