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Punishment before trial: public opinion, perp walks, and compensatory justice in the United States

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Abstract

The presumption of innocence, the prohibition against pretrial punishment, and the right to an impartial jury—constitutional bedrocks of the American criminal justice process—are potentially threatened by the practice of “perp walks.” Justice officials, politicians, and the news media have cited public demand as one justification for this controversial practice. Yet, this justification lacks an empirical basis. Drawing from work on procedural fairness, the present study suggests compensatory justice as a framework for understanding why some American citizens might support perp walks. We extend research on public attitudes towards perp walks with data from an internet survey of 1000 U.S. adults. We find that perp walks are not supported by a majority of the public and that attitudes towards perp walks are influenced by perceptions of the pros and cons of perp walks as well as of the legitimacy of the justice system.

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Notes

  1. In contrast to choreographed perp walks, staged perp walks are entirely contrived, serve no legitimate law enforcement interest, and hence have been ruled unconstitutional. A third category of perp walks, improvisational perp walks, occurs absent any collusion between the news media and criminal justice system officials; these also are constitutional. In terms of the degree of complicity between news media and criminal justice system officials, then, choreographed perp walks lie between staged and improvised perp walks.

  2. A review of the first 50 search results reveals 8 results about crime but not perp walks, 6 about perp walks in general, three sets of 2 articles reporting on the same perp walk, and 30 about a unique perp walk event.

  3. In Van Slyke et al. (2018), the term staged perp walks was defined for respondents as “when criminal justice officials notify the news media that they are going to transport a criminal suspect, in handcuffs, from one location to another, such as, for example, from the place of arrest to a police station, in such a way that the suspect can be videotaped or photographed by the news media and the images then shown to the public” (p. 615).

  4. For discussion of the widespread use and quality of internet survey data, see Das et al. (2010).

  5. OTHER was included as a dummy variable instead of being excluded from the analysis to prevent the loss of cases (i.e., 91 respondents reported a race other than African American, Hispanic/Latino, or White).

  6. UNSURE was included as a dummy variable instead of being excluded from the analysis to prevent the loss of cases (i.e., 120 respondents said they were not sure about their political ideology).

  7. INCOME was in the survey but is not included in the regression model, however, because 167 respondents declined to report income and INCOME was not significantly related to other key variables.

  8. Kelly (2017) for details on the proportional odds assumption with ordinal dependent variables.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Utica University, 1600 Burrstone Road, Utica, NY, 13502-4892, USA

    Shanna R. Van Slyke & Leslie A. Corbo

  2. School of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA

    Michael L. Benson

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  1. Shanna R. Van Slyke
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Van Slyke, S.R., Corbo, L.A. & Benson, M.L. Punishment before trial: public opinion, perp walks, and compensatory justice in the United States. Crime Law Soc Change 79, 437–452 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-022-10062-x

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