Abstract
Few experimental attempts have been reported comparing the sentencing decisions of professional judges and that of laypeople using the same criminal case. This study examined the sentencing justifications (retribution, incapacitation, general deterrence, and rehabilitation) and the resulting imprisonment sentencing differences between Japanese judges and laypeople. The online quasi-experiment comprised 48 judges and 199 laypeople. Participants read a fictional murder case, and they were asked to respond on two types of justification scales and enter the number of years of imprisonment for the offender. Both the judges and laypeople placed the highest importance on retribution in the numerical input scale, which failed to detect the difference. The Likert scale revealed that judges add less weight to rehabilitation, incapacitation, or general deterrence, than laypeople. As predicted, the number of imprisonment years chosen by judges was significantly shorter than that of laypeople. The differences in justification can cause disagreements between judges and laypeople. This study suggests that judges do not give much consideration to justifications and decide on sentencing based on different criteria than laypeople. Differences from previous studies related to the judges’ emphasis on justification and the disparity of sentences are also discussed.
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Data availability
Questions, data, and experimental material (text on the case) are available in the Open Science Framework or as supplementary material.
Code availability
Not applicable.
Notes
The new Model Penal Code “purposes” section is significantly different. It now sets the primary distributive principle for criminal liability and punishment to desert that is, the blameworthiness of the offender. Alternative distributive principles such as deterrence, incapacitation, or rehabilitation may be pursued only to the extent that they remain within the bounds of desert (Robinson et al. 2010, p. 1944).
Standard Deviation.
Although two items each may not be enough, we decided to use the same items as in the previous study (Orth 2003).
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Mr. Ryu Ishii, chief public prosecutor, for his helpful discussions and suggestions on the manuscript.
Funding
This research was facilitated by grants from JSPS KAKENHI (Grant Number 19K14358).
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WE led the study and conducted the experiments. WT reviewed the research plan and participated in writing the paper. IT analyzed the data.
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The questionnaire and methodology for this study were approved by the Ethical Review Committee for Behavioral Sciences, Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University (Ethics approval number: HB020-023).
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Watamura, E., Wakebe, T. & Ioku, T. A comparison of sentencing decisions and their justification between professional judges and laypeople in Japan. SN Soc Sci 2, 48 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-022-00353-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-022-00353-4