Sentencing Homicide Offenders in the Netherlands: Offender, Victim, and Situational Influences in Criminal Punishment*

Abstract

Empirical investigations of criminal sentencing represent a vast research enterprise in criminology. However, this research has been restricted almost exclusively to U.S. contexts, and often it suffers from key data limitations. As such, an examination of more detailed international sentencing data provides an important opportunity to assess the generalizability of contemporary research and theorizing on criminal punishment in the United States. The current study investigates little‐researched questions about the influence of prosecutorial sentencing recommendations, victim/offender relationships, and extralegal disparities in sentencing by analyzing unique data on the punishment of homicide offenders in the Netherlands. The results indicate that offender, victim, and situational offense characteristics all exert important independent effects at sentencing and that prosecutorial recommendations exert powerful influences over judicial sentences. The article concludes with a discussion of future directions for comparative sentencing research across international contexts.

Recent Developments and New Directions in Sentencing Research

“…Reports from the Netherlands indicate that sentencing disparity of a variety of kinds has long been a concern, and that country has experimented with a variety of polices, such as prosecutorial guidelines, to address disparity (see Tonry & Frase, 2001). Also, Johnson et al (2010) studied 1,613 Dutch homicide offenses from 1993 to 2004, and found that homicide offenders that victimized youth under 18, elderly people, women, and Dutch (vs. foreign) victims were sentenced more severely than those victimizing other types of victims.…”

The World Is Not Black and White: Racial Bias in the Decision to Shoot in a Multiethnic Context

“…The available national‐level data clearly point to Blacks being killed by police more often, and Whites and Asians less often, than would be expected given the percent of the population they represent in the United States. It should be noted that evidence for disparate treatment of ethnic minorities, immigrants, or “foreigners” by the criminal justice system has been found cross‐culturally (Albrecht, 1997; Johnson, van Wingerden, & Nieuwbeerta, 2010). However, the focus of the current work is on implicit racial biases that may underlie differential treatment in the United States.…”

Status, emotional displays, and the relationally-based evaluation of criminals and their behavior

“…Black (1976) argued for a more relational view of law where the combination of victim and offender characteristics impacts legal outcomes. Recent empirical tests of this assertion find that the composition of offender-victim dyads in terms of race and gender impact criminal case processing and sentencing decisions (e.g., Johnson, Van Wingerden and Nieuwbeerta 2010;Martin 2013;Roberts and Lyons 2009). …”