'Public judgement on sentencing: Final results from the Tasmanian Jury Sentencing Study' (Trends & issues in crime and criminal justice no.407) [PDF] by Kate Warner, Julia Davis, Maggie Walter, Rebecca Bradfield & Rachel Vermey indicates that over 50% of jurors surveyed from 138 trials suggested a more lenient sentence than that imposed by the trial judge. When informed of the actual sentence, in the second stage of a two-stage survey process, 90% said that the judge’s sentence was very appropriate or fairly appropriate.
One conclusion is that "portrayals of a punitive public are misleading and calls for harsher punishment largely uninformed".
The authors comment that implications from the research include -
The myth of the punitive public
The fact that 52% of jurors chose a more lenient sentence than the judge and only 44% were more severe than the judge shows that informed members of the public are not as punitive as many representative surveys have suggested. This finding mirrors previous vignette studies that also reported that when views of members of the public on a specific case are compared with those of judges, the judges’ sentences tend to be as severe or more severe than those of the public ... When informed of the sentence at Stage 2, 90% of jurors thought the sentence was very or fairly appropriate and only around a third thought that the judge should have imposed a more severe sentence.
Leniency, punitivity and malleability
Those who had selected a more lenient sentence than the judge at Stage 1 were significantly more likely to agree with the judge’s sentence at Stage 2 and more likely to say it was very appropriate than those who had selected a more severe sentence than the judge at Stage 1. In other words, jurors who were more punitive were less tolerant of the judge’s sentence and less malleable in their views than the more lenient jurors, as measured by their Stage 1 sentence choice.
Public opinion is multidimensional
Public opinion is not one dimensional; rather, it is multidimensional and contingent on particular circumstances. The jury survey methodology, which covers all trials over a lengthy period and therefore picks up a realistic assortment of sex, violence, drug and property cases, is better able to reveal broad differences in attitudes to particular offence types than the standard vignette methodology. The results showed a striking disparity in attitudes to different types of offences. For property offences, jurors were more than twice as likely to be less severe than the judge than more severe. For sex, violence and drug offences, the split between less and more severe was much more even. This difference in offence types was borne out in Stage 2. When asked how appropriate the judge’s sentence was, jurors were most satisfied with property offence sentences (57% very appropriate) and least satisfied with drug and sex offence sentences (around 35% very appropriate). Comparing the judge’s sentence with the juror’s preferred sentence at Stage 2 showed that jurors were least likely to have preferred a more severe sentence for property offences (28%) and most likely to have preferred a more severe sentence for sex and drug offences (46%).
The perception gap
There was a distinct contrast between jurors’ responses to the stimulus of a particular trial and responses to an abstract question about sentencing levels. While the view that sentencing levels are too lenient moderated somewhat after jurors had received more information in Stage 2, a clear dichotomy remained between their responses to the sentence imposed on the offender in the trial they deliberated on and their responses to the question about general sentencing levels in sex, violence and property offences, but not in drug cases. This dichotomy persisted when the general views of respondents were separated so that general attitudes for offence types were limited to jurors who had deliberated in a case of that offence type. The analysis showed that the perception gap remained in the case of sex offences, diminished but remained in violent offence cases and all but disappeared in property cases.
This jury study ... is the first to look at the impact of increased information on this dichotomy and the first to find that extra information and increased exposure to a real trial and a real sentence on an individual offender has a differential impact depending on offence type.
Attitudes towards judges
Just as 90 percent of jurors thought that the sentence imposed by the judge was appropriate, a substantial majority of 83 percent also thought that judges were in touch with public opinion. In contrast with representative surveys that have found that only 18–20 percent of respondents thought that judges were in touch with the public, jurors in this study who all had first-hand contact with judges were much less likely to say that judges were out of touch.
Impact of information
While jurors were shown to be as poorly informed about crime and sentencing trends as other members of the public, the results suggest that modest improvements in knowledge levels can be gained by providing better information directly to those who come into contact with the criminal justice system. Participants thought that other jurors would be interested in receiving such information and the results suggest that providing jurors in all trials with a crime and sentencing booklet and the reasons for the judge’s sentence has the potential to change attitudes. Moreover, because a majority of jurors discuss the sentencing outcome of their case with others, jurors also have the potential to act as conduits of information to the rest of the community. However, given that jury service touches only a minority in the community and that the provision of more information does not always lead to attitude changes, it seems that it is not a complete solution to the problem of misperceptions in the wider community. For some people, the belief that sentences are too lenient is difficult to shift.
