"Defendant's Gender Affects Length of Sentence"

A helpful reader forwarded me this posting from ScienceDaily, which has a report with a headline that serves as the title of this post.  The piece reports on research from Sweden, and here are the basics:

A study of 300 simulated court cases shows that experienced judges, lay assessors, prosecutors, police officers, and lawyers make decisions and convict defendants differently depending on whether they are men or women and what the defendant looks like. Eyewitnesses to crimes are also affected by these factors.  This is especially pronounced if there is an extended period of time separating the crime and the testimony.  This is what Angela S. Ahola, Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, shows in her dissertation.

In her study of simulated short criminal cases, Angela S. Ahola shows that gender and appearance affect our judgments of personality, occupation, morals, and reliability and create a frame of reference for our behavior.  Among other things, it was shown that judges and lay assessors both assessed and judged accused individuals of the same gender as themselves more severely than the opposite gender.  On the other hand, prosecutors, lawyers, police officers, and law students, regardless of their own gender, evaluated male defendants more harshly than women defendants.  What's more, among female members of this category, that is, those without a convicting role in the legal process, differences were seen in their evaluations depending on the looks of the accused.