Refining the measurement of consistency in sentencing: A methodological review

Exploring the origin of sentencing disparities in the Crown Court: Using text mining techniques to differentiate between court and judge disparities

“…From a more instrumental point of view, promoting consistency in sentencing tackles the 'generation of unwarranted disparities'. Unlike legitimate variations in sentencing, which reflect meaningful case or offender differences, unwarranted disparities are rooted in unjustified discrepant approaches to sentencing (Stolzenberg, L., D'Alessio, 1994;Pina-Sánchez and Linacre, 2016). They can take the form of anything from discriminatory practices against ethnic minorities (see for example Albonetti, 2002;Bushway and Piehl, 2001;Hood, 1992;King and Johnson, 2016) to more random but similarly illegitimate disparities (see Chen et al, 2016;Danziger et al, 2011;Eren and Mocan, 2016;Heyes and Saberian, 2018; where factors such as the weather, lunch breaks, or local sport results are shown to influence sentencing).…”

“…Studies aiming to measure the overall level of consistency in sentencing -or equivalently, the true extent of unwarranted disparities -are scarcer, and have not been able to offer entirely satisfactory answers. Largely this is due to the difficulties at the operationalisation stage (see Cole, 1997;Hofer et al 1999;Pina-Sánchez and Linacre, 2016). One of the most common approaches pursued in the literature to measure the extent of unwarranted disparities involves the use of multilevel models.…”

Judicial Disparity, Deviation, and Departures from Sentencing Guidelines: The Case of Hong Kong

“…Inter‐judge disparity is defined as the relative differences in average sentence lengths for comparable caseloads assigned to different judges (Anderson et al 1999). Efforts to quantify disparity have largely been devoted to measuring disparities in terms of sentence length (Albonetti 2002; Anderson & Spohn 2010; Bushway et al 2012; Fleetwood et al 2015; Nutting 2017; Pina‐Sánchez et al 2020; Pina‐Sánchez & Linacre 2016; Tillyer et al 2015). Prior to the Supreme Court's decision in Booker , a handful of studies incorporated expected sentence length as a control variable for sentencing models (Bushway & Piehl 2001; Engen & Gainey 2000; Griswold 1987).…”

Sentencing disparities in the Czech Republic: Empirical evidence from post-communist Europe

“…Do judges and courts differ in the way they set sanctions? Many studies have suggested that they do (for reviews, see Pina-Sánchez and Linacre, 2016; Sporer and Goodman-Delahunty, 2009). It is natural that, where there is discretion in decision-making, unwarranted disparity appears.…”