Julia Davis

Measuring jurors views on sentencing: Results from the second Australian jury sentencing study

This paper presents the results of the Victorian Jury Sentencing Study which aimed to measure jurors’ views on sentencing. The study asked jurors who had returned a guilty verdict to propose a sentence for the offender, to comment on the sentence given by the judge in their case and to give their opinions on general sentencing levels for different offence types. A total of 987 jurors from 124 criminal trials in the County Court of Victoria participated in this mixed-method and multi-phased study in 2013–2015. The results are based on juror responses to the Stage One and Stage Two surveys and show that the views of judges and jurors are much more closely aligned than mass public opinion surveys would suggest.

Doing Justice to Dignity in the Criminal Law

An important task for any community is to find a source of principled limits on the criminal law. This search is frustrated by the fact that the concept of wrongdoing, just like the contested concept of a crime itself, is open and empty of factual content. The ordinary definitions of wrongdoing, as conduct that deviates from a rule, standard or norm of conduct that is thought to be right, and of a crime as ‘a legal wrong that can be followed by criminal proceedings which may result in punishment’ both leave undone the hard work of identifying in precise factual terms the conduct that ought to be forbidden by the criminal law and providing acceptable reasons why it is thought to be right to punish offenders who are responsible for that conduct.

Why sentence? Comparing the views of jurors, judges and the legislature on the purposes of sentencing in Victoria, Australia:

In recent times, parliaments have introduced legislation directing judges to take defined purposes into account when sentencing. At the same time, judges and politicians also acknowledge that sentencing should vindicate the values of the community. This article compares the views on the purposes of sentencing of three major participants in the criminal justice system: legislators who pass sentencing statutes, judges who impose and justify sentences and jurors who represent the community. A total of 987 Australian jurors in the Victorian Jury Sentencing Study (2013–2015) were asked to sentence the offender in their trial and to choose the purpose that best justified the sentence. The judges’ sentencing remarks were coded and the results were compared with the jurors’ surveys. The research shows that, in this jurisdiction, the views of the judges, the jurors and the legislators are not always well aligned. Judges relied on general deterrence much more than jurors and jurors selected incapacitation as the primary purpose in only about a fifth of ‘serious offender’ cases where parliament has provided that community protection must be the principal purpose.