Field studies in many domains have found evidence of decision fatigue, a phenomenon describing how decision quality can be impaired by the act of making previous decisions. Debate remains, however, over posited psychological mechanisms underlying decision fatigue, and the size of effects in high-stakes settings. We examine an extensive set of pretrial arraignments in a large, urban court system to investigate how judicial release and bail decisions are influenced by the time an arraignment occurs. We find that release rates decline modestly in the hours before lunch and before dinner, and these declines persist after statistically adjusting for an extensive set of observed covariates. However, we find no evidence that arraignment time affects pretrial release rates in the remainder of each decision-making session. Moreover, we find that release rates remain unchanged after a meal break even though judges have the opportunity to replenish their mental and physical resources by resting and eating. In a complementary analysis, we find that the rate at which judges concur with prosecutorial bail requests does not appear to be influenced by either arraignment time or a meal break. Taken together, our results imply that to the extent that decision fatigue plays a role in pretrial release judgments, effects are small and inconsistent with previous explanations implicating psychological depletion processes.

There is a saying: “Justice delayed is justice denied.” The perception of a continuing failure of the Philippine criminal justice system to deliver fast and efficient justice has inevitably led to the erosion of public trust in the government. As a consequence, citizens are laden with anxiety because of unabated criminality and violence in their communities. The type of justice that leads to peace and prosperity continues to be elusive in the Philippines as the worsening scenario of jail congestion continues to manifest its malevolent implications for the human rights of prisoners. It appears that the culprit is an overwhelmed machinery of criminal justice that has not been able to keep pace with growing rates of population, urbanization and criminality. There is also an apparent imbalance in the justice structure where there are too few judges, prosecutors and public defence attorneys to process the cases filed by the numerous law enforcers who file criminal cases. This leads to bottlenecks in criminal justice procedures and has resulted, in not a few instances, in human rights crises in jails. However, emerging developments give some hope to Filipinos.