Big Disparities in Judging of Asylum Cases

[babylonsister]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/washington/31asylum.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1180610404-kCPP0nptlSP5u6ItIYxidQ

Big Disparities in Judging of Asylum Cases

By JULIA PRESTON
Published: May 31, 2007

Asylum seekers in the United States face broad disparities in the nation’s 54 immigration courts, with the outcome of cases influenced by things like the location of the court and the sex and professional background of judges, a new study has found.

The study, by three law professors, analyzes 140,000 decisions by immigration judges, including those cases from the 15 countries that have produced the most asylum seekers in recent years, among them China, Haiti, Colombia, Albania and Russia. The professors compared for the first time the results of immigration court cases over more than four years, finding vast differences in the handling of claims with generally comparable factual circumstances.

In one of the starker examples cited, Colombians had an 88 percent chance of winning asylum from one judge in the Miami immigration court and a 5 percent chance from another judge in the same court.

“It is very disturbing that these decisions can mean life or death, and they seem to a large extent to be the result of a clerk’s random assignment of a case to a particular judge,” said an author of the study, Philip G. Schrag, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

more...