Lay Persons' Judgment on Criminal Cases

Abstract

Court decisions in criminal cases are sometimes different from what a lay person thinks is appropriate as punishment for the offenders. In this study, university students were asked to read summaries of 20 real criminal cases, and judge what they thought were appropriate sentences for the accused in the cases. The students' judgments were more severe than those of the courts by an average of 3.6 to 5.3 years. Similarities between the cases were calculated using subjective ratings for features of each criminal case and analyzed using a method of multidimensional scaling (MDS). Two-dimensional representation of the cases shows that a lay person perceives a crime from its degree of "viciousness-pending circumstances" and "intentional-accidental."