Socioeconomic Class and Criminal Defense Cases
It is not just your imagination that the criminal justice system treats people differently depending on their background. Jurors are more likely to look at a teenager from the wrong side of the tracks who got charged with reckless driving and drug possession as a lowlife who was fortunate enough to get caught before he injured someone, whereas the same jurors would look at a prep school student who got charged with the same offenses as a good kid who made a mistake and who deserves multiple other chances before anyone thinks the worst of him. It is not just juries who treat defendants from privileged backgrounds better. Judges are also more likely to give defendants the benefit of the doubt if those defendants have money in the bank. Since this phenomenon is common and cases of judges accepting bribes are rare, one can assume that judges do this because of their own biases and not out of hope for their own financial gain. Here, our Miami criminal defense lawyer explains how economically privileged defendants tend to get better outcomes in their criminal cases and how you have the right to due process, including but not limited to a fair trial, regardless of your socioeconomic background.
Racial Disparities in Sentencing Persist, but They Are Less Than They Were 30 Years Ago
This month, Nikki Rojas published a new report in the Harvard Gazette about sentencing disparities in criminal cases. The report focuses on felony drug crimes that do not involve physical violence. It found that racial disparities in sentencing persist, but they have declined since their peak in the early 1990s, after the War on Drugs had been gaining traction for decades. The year where the likelihood of getting prison time for a drug conviction showed the sharpest divide along racial lines was 1992, when Black defendants were 14 times as likely to go to prison as White defendants convicted on the same charges. In 2024, the most recent year covered in the report, Black defendants were 1.5 times as likely as White defendants to get prison time in equivalent drug cases. The report did not include data about sentencing rates for other racial groups.
Is Avoiding Prison Time as Simple as Flashing Your College Diploma?
The biggest takeaway from the report was that socioeconomic status was the biggest predictor of whether a defendant convicted of a nonviolent felony drug offense would get a prison sentence. The report used college education as a proxy for socioeconomic status; it compared college graduates to people with no college education. This is because college education is prohibitively expensive for everyone except wealthy and upper middle-class people. The report determined that, regardless of race and any other factors, defendants with college diplomas were far less likely to get prison time for a drug conviction than defendants without a college education.
If Money Doesn’t Buy Justice, What Does It Buy?
The Harvard Gazette report only included defendants who got convicted of nonviolent drug crimes, but its implications are even wider than that. It is noteworthy that most defendants whose cases get to the stage of entering a plea plead guilty either immediately or during the pretrial process. Therefore, the Harvard Gazette study included convictions resulting from guilty pleas as well as those arising from guilty verdicts at a jury trial.
It does not include the differences in other phases of the judicial process. Here, instead of using college education as a proxy for socioeconomic status, we should compare defendants who hire criminal defense lawyers with their own money or that of their family and friends to defendants represented by court-appointed attorneys from the public defender’s office. If you hire your own lawyer, things go more smoothly for you at every stage of the process. The chances are greater that the court will drop the charges against you without even asking you to enter a plea. You also have a better chance of entering a pretrial diversion program, where you must serve a probation sentence, but the court will eventually drop your charges without a conviction going on your record. If you plead not guilty, your lawyer may be able to persuade the court to exclude key pieces of evidence, which could lead to an acquittal or the court dropping the charges during the pretrial period.
Contact Our Criminal Defense Attorneys
A South Florida criminal defense lawyer can help you by representing you in a criminal case, even if it is the most bougie thing you ever do. Contact Ratzan & Faccidomo in Miami, Florida for a confidential consultation about your case.
Source:
news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/02/class-surges-as-factor-in-who-gets-sent-to-prison/
