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Cook County Judge Domenica Stephenson just acquitted the officers who tried to cover up the #LaquanMcDonald shooting. Data shows she has a history of making racist decisions as a judge. A thread.
Usually data isn’t available showing how individual judges make decisions. But Cook County has extensive data including 1,640 defendants who Judge Domenica Stephenson has sentenced. The data shows she incarcerates black people at higher rates than whites for the same offenses.
Here’s the overall disparity in her sentencing to incarceration rates by race. She sentenced half of white defendants to incarceration but *two-thirds* of black defendants (the rest generally were sentenced to probation). But let’s dive deeper... 
Are the higher incarceration rates due to black defendants being convicted of more serious crimes? Nope. Here are the 5 most common offense types in order. For the four most common, Judge Stephenson sentences black people to incarceration at higher rates. For. The. Same. Crimes.
On top of all of that, Judge Stephenson sentences black people to *longer* sentences than white people for the same offenses - both overall and for the subset of cases in which she sentenced people to incarceration. Institutional racism at every level.
You can explore the full dataset for Cook County judges, state’s attorney and other institutional decisionmakers here. We need this kind of data in more jurisdictions to hold judges accountable for the ways in which they perpetuate institutional racism. cookcountystatesattorney.org/caseleveldata
