Status, Hierarchy, and Sentencing in Corruption Trials

Luiz Vilaça, Assistant Professor

Research consistently finds that defendants’ class and social status shape their treatment in the justice system, with high-status offenders often receiving more lenient outcomes. This pattern may reflect disparities in access to high-quality legal representation, judicial perceptions that distance elite actors from “ordinary” criminality, or evidentiary challenges faced by prosecutors when pursuing cases against elites. Yet existing scholarship has not systematically examined whether these dynamics hold in the context of large-scale corruption prosecutions. Unlike trials of street crime, grand corruption trials are rare and seldom culminate in convictions of powerful political and corporate elites. I expect that, in these cases, judges may actually adopt a more punitive stance toward high-level executives and public officials to signal institutional resolve, making these cases exemplars in order to deter future corruption. To test this theory, the study draws on an original database of 1,053 defendants prosecuted in Brazil’s Operação Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash), the largest corruption and money laundering investigation in the country’s history. I measure defendants’ elite embeddedness with indicators of firm size and hierarchical position within the organization. Employing regressionmodels with judge and crime fixed effects, I assess whether and how defendants’ elite embeddedness influences their likelihood of conviction, sentence length, and fines.

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 Presented in Session 202. Crime, Justice and the Law