Judges in Muslim countries are much more likely to acquit when fasting during Ramadan. Sultan Mehmood, a professor at the Russian School of Economics, proved this by analyzing Indian and Pakistani verdicts handed down over the past half-century, the article states, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
Ramadan is a month of obligatory fasting for Muslims, during which believers are prohibited from taking food and water, drinking, smoking and having intimate relations during the day.
Sultan Mehmud, a professor at the New Economic School who studies the peculiarities of legal systems in various societies, set out to find out how fasting affects the sentencing process in Muslim countries. In 2011, Israeli scientists coined the concept of the “hungry judge effect,” showing that judges are more likely to refuse to release suspects if they decide to do so on an empty stomach.
Mehmood decided to find out if such an effect is observed in the decisions of Muslim judges during Ramadan. To do this, he and his French colleagues analyzed nearly half a million judgments rendered by 10,000 judges in two different countries over the past half-century.
“We assessed the impact of Ramadan fasting on convictions over the past half-century in India and Pakistan, which represent a quarter of the world’s population,” the scientists write. The result surprised the study authors, who expected to see a decline in fasting acquittals.
“We observed a dramatic and statistically significant increase in acquittals by Muslim judges during Ramadan and no change in verdicts by non-Muslim judges,” the authors explained. It turned out that both countries are characterized by an increase in the number of acquittals during Ramadan by 40% compared to other times of the year.
Additionally, the more judges starve, the more forgiving they become – each additional hour of fasting increases the chance of acquittal by 10%. At the same time, the authors were able to assess the validity of such decisions. It turned out that suspects acquitted during Ramadan were less likely to reoffend – the recidivism rate was lower, including for serious crimes such as murder and armed robbery.
According to the authors of the study, more lenient punishments during the fast could be due to “the idea of mercy inherent in Muslim ritual”.
