Keren Weinshall-Margel

Who they are

This page covers one piece of work. Keren Weinshall-Margel is first author of the 2011 letter "Overlooked factors in the analysis of parole decisions", published in volume 108, issue 42, of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, page E833. No affiliation or further publications have been confirmed for this site, so none are listed.

The letter responded to the paper by Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav and Liora Avnaim-Pesso, which reported that favourable parole rulings in Israel fell within decision sessions and recovered after breaks. As Andreas Glöckner summarises it, Weinshall-Margel and Shapard drew on informal interviews with people in the parole process, including a panel judge, and concluded that the ordering of cases is not random. Their point was that prisoners without a lawyer usually go last and are less likely to be granted parole. If that is right, part of the decline across a session reflects who is heard last and not how tired the judges are.

Glöckner also reports that the interviewees said judges might try to finish a set of cases within a session, which he reads as evidence of some organisational planning. The authors of the original paper replied that the downward trend held when they controlled for representation.

What the record shows

The letter by Weinshall-Margel and Shapard, "Overlooked factors in the analysis of parole decisions", appeared in PNAS in October 2011 (volume 108, issue 42). In Glöckner's 2016 account, they concluded that case ordering is not random, which matters because the parole study depends on the position of a case within a session. The original authors replied in the same issue, and in Glöckner's summary showed that the downward trend also holds when controlling for representation by an attorney.

The exchange did not end the dispute. Glöckner's later simulation proposed that session planning, with a judge ending a session instead of starting a case likely to overrun, could produce a decline of similar shape, though somewhat smaller, and he concluded that further factors may exist. The letter is therefore best read as the first of several challenges to a single causal reading, not as a refutation.

Key papers

Weinshall-Margel, K., & Shapard, J. (2011). Overlooked factors in the analysis of parole decisions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(42), E833. A short letter and not a full study. No books are listed for this author on this page.

Key ideas

The order of cases within a decision session can be systematically related to the features that predict an outcome.

A decline across a session is not evidence of fatigue unless ordering is ruled out as a cause.

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