Translating Talks: Federal Intervention and the Effect of Expanding Interpreter Provision in North Carolina Courts

Following a 2012 Department of Justice investigation, North Carolina courts were compelled to significantly liberalize their language access policy. I take advantage of this policy shock to not only gauge whether this policy change actually affected the rate at which interpreters were provided, but also realize a novel analysis of the impact of interpreter provision on defendant-level outcomes that is better equipped to identify causal impact than the prior research. Employing a regression kink design and using a dataset collected specifically for this research, I demonstrate that in Mecklenburg county, the expanded language access policy led to interpreters being provided at a greater rate, an increase further spurred when the DoJ demonstrated continued monitoring capacity after the policy was finalized. I also present evidence of a potential connection between this policy and guilty pleas & verdicts among Hispanic defendants. Wake county, however, did not experience the same increase in interpreter provision, which exploratory analysis suggests is due in part to differential access to qualified interpreters between the two counties. I close with policy recommendations based on these findings.