Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-2xdlg Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-03T18:24:40.191Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Having Their Day in Court: Defendant Evaluations of the Fairness of their Treatment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Jonathan D. Casper
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Defendants in criminal cases were asked to evaluate the fairness of the treatment they received. Several correlates of defendant evaluations are discussed, including “predisposing” variables (race, past record, and political alienation) and “case-specific” variables (sentence received, disposition by trial or plea, and a defendant's sense of how his sentence compares with those given to others). All are related to a sense of fair treatment, sentence received and comparison level most strongly. The implications of these findings for recent discussions of plea bargaining and greater sentence equity are discussed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , Winter 1978 , pp. 237 - 251
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 Law and Society Association.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

For their help in analyzing the data and for comments on this article, I should like to thank Dick Brody, Paul Sniderman, Dan Okimoto, John Manley, and Steve Woolpert.

References

CASPER, Jonathan D. (1972) American Criminal Justice: The Defendant's Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
CASPER, Jonathan D. (1977) “Improving Defender-Client Relations,” 34 NLADA Briefcase 114.Google Scholar
CASPER, Jonathan D. (1978) Criminal Courts: The Defendant's Perspective. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
EISENSTEIN, James and Herbert, JACOB (1977) Felony Justice. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.Google Scholar
ENKER, Arnold (1967) “Perspectives on Plea Bargaining,” in President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, Task Force Report: The Courts. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
FRANKEL, Marvin (1973) Criminal Sentences. New York: Hill & Wang.Google Scholar
KATZ, Daniel (1975) Bureaucratic Encounters. Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.Google Scholar
PACKER, Herbert (1968) The Limits of the Criminal Sanction. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
PIAGET, Jean (1932) The Moral Judgment of the Child. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.Google Scholar
RAWLS, John (1958) “Justice as Fairness,” 67 Philosophical Review 164.Google Scholar
SNIDERMAN, Paul (1978) “The Politics of Faith,” 8(1) British Journal of Political Science (forthcoming).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
STONE, Julius (1965) Human Law and Human Justice. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
THIBAUT, J.W. and H.H., KELLEY (1959) The Social Psychology of Groups. New York: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
VON HIRSCH, Andrew (1976) Doing Justice: The Choice of Punishment. New York: Hill & Wang.Google Scholar