Effects of Court Officials on Sentence Severity - Do Judges Make a Difference?

• NCJ Number: 85180
• Journal: Criminology Volume: 20 Issue: 2 Dated: (August 1982) Pages: 257-272
• Author(s): C E Frazier; E W Bock
• Date Published: 1982
• Length: 16 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Earlier version presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology, November 1981.

Annotation

The present article examines the effects on sentencing of a number of variables measuring court actors and their traits.

Abstract

Sentencing patterns were shown to vary substantially from judge to judge but the differences were found to be related more to the types of cases judges received than to sentencing styles of individual judges. Independent of traditional sociodemographic traits of offenders and legal variables, individual judges do not appear to sentence differently. Moreover, when we estimated equations which included judicial background characteristics, there were no discernible independent effects. These findings differ from both informed intuition and inferences one might draw from previous research. Consideration of subcultures of justice and cases on which court officials disagree about sentences may help explain differences between present and past research. (Publisher abstract)