How Compassionate? Political Appointments and District Court Judge Responses to Compassionate Release during COVID-19

This paper seeks to examine how judges are deciding compassionate-release motions in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has proven particularly deadly inside the nation’s prisons. I explore how judges appointed by Republicans and Democrats have ruled in more than 4,000 federal compassionate-release cases since March 2020, finding that judges appointed by Democrats are granting compassionate release at far higher rates than their Republican counterparts, with Trump judges granting among the fewest requests. The First Step Act of 2018 gave incarcerated individuals the right to file a motion for early release in court in light of “extraordinary and compelling” circumstances, and requests for release have skyrocketed since the outbreak of the virus. The unique conditions of the pandemic, high levels of virus transmission in prisons, and the highly discretionary nature of the compassionate-release statute together offer a natural experiment for considering how judicial ideology impacts real lives. The results of this analysis underscore the importance of the fight over control of the judiciary going forward.