No, the original study didn’t—-and that was its fatal flaw.
They assumed that cases were randomly ordered and this equally likely to get the same sentence. However, they were actually done in blocks, each containing prisoners from one prison. Judges tried to finish a block before adjourning. Within each block, cases were ordered by attorney and those without an attorney were last.
For many reasons, people representing themselves tend to fare more poorly. Boom, there’s the effect!
Another obvious tell that there was a problem is that ordinal rank (1st, 2nd, etc) was associated with severity but wall time was not (once you also include rank). The mechanism presumably isn’t linked to the number of cases heard (swinging the gavel isn’t *that energetically expensive!) but the passage of time since the meal. Thus, you’d expect the exact opposite effect.
IMO making this assumption is inexcusable, and I find it hard to believe it was "accidently overlooked". Asking a single judge for comments on the study before publishing it would have been enough.
They assumed that cases were randomly ordered and this equally likely to get the same sentence. However, they were actually done in blocks, each containing prisoners from one prison. Judges tried to finish a block before adjourning. Within each block, cases were ordered by attorney and those without an attorney were last.
For many reasons, people representing themselves tend to fare more poorly. Boom, there’s the effect!
PNAS published a commentary pointing this out but naturally it’s been cited 80x less: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1110910108
Another obvious tell that there was a problem is that ordinal rank (1st, 2nd, etc) was associated with severity but wall time was not (once you also include rank). The mechanism presumably isn’t linked to the number of cases heard (swinging the gavel isn’t *that energetically expensive!) but the passage of time since the meal. Thus, you’d expect the exact opposite effect.