Effect of defendant’s remorse on bail amount in the simulated tax-fraud hearing

Determine whether the defendant’s level of expressed remorse, operationalized as a five-level ordinal variable, causally affects the bail amount set by the judge in the large language model–based simulation of a $50{,}000 tax-fraud bail hearing, and quantify the magnitude and direction of this effect within the specified structural causal model.

Background

The paper simulates a bail hearing in which a judge sets bail for a criminal defendant who committed $50,000 in tax fraud. Using a structural causal model, the authors consider three exogenous causes—defendant’s criminal history, judge’s case count for the day, and defendant’s expressed remorse—and measure the outcome as the bail amount set by the judge.

While criminal history shows a statistically significant positive effect on bail, the estimated effect of expressed remorse is borderline significant and the authors explicitly state uncertainty about whether remorse affected bail. This leaves unresolved whether remorse has a causal impact on bail in their LLM-based experimental setup and, if so, its magnitude and sign.