In particular, the cases are heard in a particular order. For each prison, the prisoners with counsel go before those who are representing themselves. As in the US, those representing themselves typically fair worse. The judges try to finish an entire prison's worth of hearings before a meal, so the least-likely-to-succeed cases are typically assigned to spots right before a break.

There are some other bits of weirdness in the original data too. They found a statistically significant association between the ordinal position (e.g., 1st, 2nd, ..., last) and the parole board's decision, but failed to find any effect of actual time elapsed (e.g., in minutes), even though the latter is much more compatible with a physiological hypothesis like running out of glucose.