Shapard and Weinshall-Margel (1) elucidate several critiques of our article,“Extraneous factors in judicial decisions”(2), in which we report a greater likelihood of judicial ruling in favor of a prisoner at the beginning of the work day or after a food break than later in a sequence of cases. They argue that two interlinked factors jointly produce our results:(i) all prisoners from one prison are seen before a break is taken, and (ii) all prisoners without representation are seen at the end of each decision session, prior to the breaks. The data fail to support their assertions. We recoded our data—including representation as an explanatory variable—and reran all of the regression models presented in our original manuscript, but this time also included representation as one of the predictors. The original results replicate in every analysis; case order and the meal break remain robust predictors of the parole decision. The presence of legal counsel was always positively correlated with release likelihood but was not a significant predictor in every single model that we ran. For instance, in the four regression models of table 1 in our original article (2), the number and identity of significant parameters was unaffected, save for months served, which approached significance for models 1–3. Predictably, the addition of representation significantly improved model fit. Because Shapard and Weinshall-Margel’s dataset did not contain case order, they were unable to run this test.

Regarding prison of origin, we have data for 5 d. In all instances prisoners from the same prison appear before and after a break. Note that prison of origin alone cannot explain our effect, because there is nothing about it that predicts a decrease in likelihood of favorable rulings. Additionally, we reinterviewed prison personnel; they validated our original report that attorneys represent clients on a first come, first served basis. This precludes an ordering by prison.