THIS PAPER CONCERNS SOME JURISPRUDENTIAL ISSUES RAISED BY THE abolition of the mandatory life sentence for murder, a step undertaken in New South Wales in 1982— Crimes (Homicide) Amendment Act 1982, Crimes (Life Sentences) Amendment Act 1989— and Victoria in 1986— Crimes (Amendment) Act 1986. It starts, however, with more general issues of sentencing philosophy. The first main section of this p...

Recent research has highlighted a relationship between perceptions of trustworthiness from faces and capital sentencing outcomes. Here, we extended those findings by replicating the relationship between trustworthiness and the death penalty among a new sample of targets convicted of capital murder in Arkansas and by demonstrating that facial trustworthiness guides naive sentencing decisions. Fi...

The present study was conducted to investigate the relationship between both expert witness confidence and juror personality with expert witness credibility, as well as expert witness credibility with juror sentencing outcome. Participants were presented with one of three randomly assigned filmed scenarios depicting various levels of manipulated witness confidence. They then completed a sentenc...

This dissertation uses data on a large sample of felony defendants processed in a nationally representative sample of large urban counties, in conjunction with data on the characteristics of the jurisdictions in which their cases were adjudicated, to examine the influence of community characteristics on sentencing decisions. Drawing on prior theoretical and empirical research, hierarchical line...

This study explored the structural sources behind variability in the sentences applied to felons convicted in state courts located across the U.S. Multilevel regression models were used to explore whether various state and county-level attributes help to account for why defendants experience a significantly higher probability of incarceration versus probation in certain jurisdictions. Drawing u...

Court-mandated downsizing of the CA prison system has led to a redistribution of detainees from prisons to CA county jails, and subsequent jail overcrowding. Using data that is representative of the LA County jail system, we build a mathematical model that tracks the flow of individuals during arraignment, pretrial release or detention, case disposition, jail sentence, and possible recidivism d...

Title of Document: DOES PROCESS MATTER IN MILITARY SENTENCING? A STUDY OF THE TRIAL PENALTY IN AIR FORCE COURTS-MARTIAL Patricia D. Breen, Master of Arts, 2008 Directed by: Assistant Professor Brian D. Johnson Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice Prior sentencing research has largely ignored the military justice system even though over two million people are subject to its jurisdictio...

In Canada, illicit drug use and addiction have traditionally been considered as a criminal justice problem and have been addressed from a legal perspective. Over the past century, a medical approach to drug addiction has slowly crept into the criminal justice processing of drug offenders. This has happened through the combination of principles of punishment with principles of addiction treatmen...

This paper empirically documents one way in which prosecutorial discretion can be used to dampen the effects of mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Specifically, I show prosecutors use their discretion over prosecution charges to circumvent a mandatory minimum sentencing law for some defendants, by prosecuting these defendants who were initially arrested for the crime targeted by the sentencing ...

Sexual offending by young people is increasingly viewed as a social problem that requires a strong response, but there is little research on the legal treatment of youthful sex offenders. On the one hand, these youths may be viewed as potential future sex offenders; on the other hand, because of their youth and immaturity they may be considered more reformable than adults and their behaviour mo...