This is a repository copy of Exploring the Origin of Sentencing Disparities in the Crown Court: Using Text Mining Techniques to Differentiate between Court and Judge Disparities.
This paper investigates the presence of unwarranted between court disparities in England and Wales, examining whether they can be explained by non-legal contextual factors such as the organisation of the court, and socioeconomics of the area. In contrast with previous literature, we emphasise the importance of controlling for a wide range of legally relevant case characteristics. The findings reveal that some preliminary startling trends, such as more severe sentencing in courts located in neighbourhoods with high proportions of Muslim residents, are in fact accounted for by differences in the cases reviewed across courts. These findings call into question the validity of previous studies exploring the influence of the context on sentencing that did not adequately control for legal factors.
Inside Crown Court provides a comprehensive account of the experiences of victims, witnesses and defendants who appear at the Crown Court in England and Wales. The authors draw upon interviews and court observations to describe the essential features of the court process as experienced by these groups of individuals (referred to as 'court users'), the interplay between professionals and members of these groups and the extent to which the court process is regarded as legitimate and fair. This book offers a compelling and nuanced examination of a subject that is often unacknowledged or misunderstood by researchers and legal professionals alike. The authors set the scene by offering a summary of the relevant literature, a detailed account of their methodology and an overview of the role of the Crown Court within the court system in England and Wales. They then present five chapters of empirical findings based on 147 interviews with court users and criminal justice professionals and 200 hours of Crown Court observations. In Chapter 3, the extent to which the court process establishes the 'truth' in relation to alleged offences is called into question through an examination of the subjective experience of the parties involved and the push for guilty pleas. Chapter 4 argues that while the adversarial nature of the court process creates the impression of a division between the prosecution and defence, in reality it is the divide between professionals and court users that is most prominent. Chapter 5 describes what is termed 'structured mayhem'. It is argued that despite the delays and the start and stop nature of the process incurred by failures to attend, technological problems and missing paperwork, the court process maintains an underlying structured and ordered character. In Chapter 6, the authors assert that notwithstanding the emotional strain associated with coming to court, the vast majority of court users continue to attend and perform the roles expected of them. Finally, Chapter 7 suggests that court users conform to the rules because they believe in the legitimacy of the process. This perception of legitimacy is based on an interaction between users' moral alignment with the criminal justice system, the outcome of the case, the extent to which decision making is regarded as fair, respectful treatment by professionals and defendants' passive acceptance of the process. The 627328C RJ0010.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.