Disparate Treatment of the Irish in 19th Century English Courtrooms

This paper studies how and why anti-Irish sentiment in 19th century England spills over onto jury decisions at London’s Old Bailey Central Criminal Court. We classify the (perceived) ethnicity of courtroom participants according to whether they have distinctly Irish or English surnames based on place of birth in the 1881 census. Irish-named defendants have significantly worse outcomes: juries are 3% more likely to convict Irish-named defendants and 16% less likely to recommend mercy in sentencing. Sentencing gaps are larger for violent crimes and robust to different classifications of surname Irishness, as well as to the inclusion of case and defendant controls. We argue that these findings are unlikely to be driven by correlated unobservable case or trial characteristics (like defense quality). Rather, we provide two pieces of evidence consistent with the gaps being driven by animus towards those perceived to be Irish. First, taking advantage of exogenous variation in expected punishment driven by the abolition of capital punishment, we show that juries react differentially to shifts in extraneous factors when the defendant is Irish- versus English-named. Second, these gaps are not limited to Irish-named defendants but also seen for other courtroom participants – namely Irish-named victims. Finally, we trace out the longer run evolution of these gaps throughout the 1800s: they first emerge during the capital punishment reform period, widen during the mid-century Irish Potato Famine induced migration to London, and thereafter remain primarily stable.