Procedural Justice at German Courts as Seen by Defendants and Juvenile Prisoners

• NCJ Number: 155256
• Journal: Social Justice Research Volume: 8 Issue: 2 Dated: (June 1995) Pages: 197-215
• Author(s): V Haller; S Machura
• Date Published: 1995
• Length: 19 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Research (Applied/Empirical)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This article summarizes German research on procedural and distributive justice in criminal courts, and two field studies addressing these topics are presented.

Abstract

Procedural justice characteristics such as neutrality, courtesy, equal consideration of evidence, voice, and fairness of procedural rules are relevant for Germans. Procedural justice is often more important than distributive justice. To evaluate court experiences with procedural and distributive justice approaches, defendants in five German lower criminal courts were investigated. These defendants had been charged with traffic offenses and other criminal offenses expected to result in a fine or imprisonment of no more than 2 years. To distinguish expectations and evaluations defendants had before trial and their actual court experiences, respondents were interviewed before and after trial. Many defendants differentiated between outcome, outcome fairness, and procedural fairness. Defendants with and without court experiences appeared to differ in their expectations before their hearings. In another study, juvenile prisoners were interviewed to assess the role of perceived injustice in defendant evaluations of court experiences. Outcome level variables, procedural and distributive fairness, were used as explanatory variables for three dependent variables: outcome satisfaction, court evaluation, and judge evaluation. The sample included 120 juvenile prisoners who completed written interviews with closed questions. The juveniles had been sentenced to between 6 months and 8 years. Data showed that absolute outcome level, as well as relative outcome levels, were clearly set apart from procedural and distributive fairness. No significant relation could be found with absolute outcome level on the one hand and evaluation of courts, procedural fairness, and outcome satisfaction on the other. In addition, correlations of absolute outcome level with distributive fairness and judge evaluations were low. Outcome satisfaction seemed to be much more related to combined fairness variables than to the combined outcome level variable. 25 references and 5 tables