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Psychohistorian comments on The Bias You Didn't Expect - Less Wrong
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One question worth considering is how parole hearings get scheduled in the first place.
If there's a general understanding among lawyers that their odds are adjusted even slightly based on judges meals, that might drive a systematic tendency to schedule the most compelling cases right after meals (to "put all of my wood behind one arrow," as a former boss used to put it., and the least compelling cases right before them.
This would probably split randomly. Also, lawyers are probably not scheduling blocks of hearings (if they even have any say in scheduling). You schedule for your client, so if you knew, all you would do is schedule ALL your cases for right after lunch, if possible.
Even if that weren't the case, there's no particular reason why you'd want a more favorable judge for an easy win than for a tough one. Indeed, there are many reasons you'd want a more favorable judge for a tougher-to-win case - higher marginal benefit, mostly. In short, it'd be very hard for underlying factors to create meaningful systematic bias on such an obvious characteristic in a sample this size. Unless there's some odd organizational principle, like, "More serious offenses are put off until the end of the day," and such was not observed.