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John Meixner @johnmeixner.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

I'm doing a bunch of workshopping of this piece over the summer @lawandsociety.bsky.social, the Richmond Junior Faculty Forum, and the Harvard/Yale/Stanford Junior Faculty Forum. Would love to hear your thoughts & reactions!

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John Meixner @johnmeixner.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

3) individual attorneys vary strongly in the effectiveness of their presentations, and certain classes of attorneys (largely CJA panel-appointed attorneys) present less mitigation than others.

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John Meixner @johnmeixner.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

2) But certain other things that correlate with race do seem to seem to affect mitigation presentations. The big one: attorneys representing detained defendants (who are disproportionately people of color) present less mitigation for those defendants.

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John Meixner @johnmeixner.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

Here, I report new results examining whether criminal defendants benefit equally from mitigation, or whether it helps certain defendants disproportionately. The key takeaways: 1) For the most part, I do not find evidence that race has a substantial impact on the effectiveness of mitigation

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John Meixner @johnmeixner.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

Very fortunately, I was able to partner with the U.S. Sentencing Commission, who graciously agreed to share some of their data connected to the defendants in my hand-coded dataset. Through that, I'm able to control for many more things that might related to mitigation (such as race or education).

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John Meixner @johnmeixner.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

But because all of my data were gathered from publicly available sources, I didn't know much about the defendants in the cases that I studied. I couldn't answer some important questions, such as whether white defendant benefited disproportionately from mitigation compared to others.

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John Meixner @johnmeixner.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

In some prior work, I showed that as attorneys present more of this "personal" mitigation about the defendant, sentences tend to decrease, even when controlling for things like sentence severity.

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John Meixner @johnmeixner.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

For the past few years, I've been working on a series of papers examining whether background mitigation about a criminal defendant's past (e.g., evidence of a traumatic upbringing or a history of mental illness) relates to sentences ultimately imposed in federal cases.

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John Meixner @johnmeixner.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

New paper forthcoming in the Fordham Law Review! Equality in Sentencing Mitigation. A brief 🧵 papers.ssrn.com/abstract=524...

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John Meixner @johnmeixner.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Looking forward to seeing you there!

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Reposted by John Meixner

Thomas Kadri @thomaskadri.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

“Brokering Safety” is forthcoming in Calif. L. Rev.! With @chinmayisharma.bsky.social & @samadler.bsky.social, we expose privacy law's complicity in how data brokers worsen stalking & IPV, then pitch a system for victims to obscure data across all brokers in one go. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

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John Meixner @johnmeixner.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

I had wonderful day presenting sentencing research at LSU Law @lsulawcenter.bsky.social. Thanks @johnparsi.bsky.social, Caprice Roberts, and all of the rest of the faculty for such a warm welcome!

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John Meixner @johnmeixner.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

Yeah, though mine just came back on.

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John Meixner @johnmeixner.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

For the second consecutive year, had a wonderful experience presenting research about sentencing at the Junior Scholars Conference at Northeastern Law. Thanks @davidasimon.bsky.social for organizing! What a service to junior scholars all over!

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