Potential Impact of Research on Adolescent Development on Juvenile Judge Decision‐making

This paper discusses how biological and psychological literature on the developmental differences between juveniles and adults may affect juvenile judges in their “dual role” as retributive and rehabilitative decision‐makers in juvenile cases, specifically focusing on sentencing. Particularly, it discusses potential influences of this research on adolescent development regarding four factors known to be integral in juvenile judge decision‐making: legal factors, characteristics of juvenile offenders, and individual structural and social contexts in which judges’ decisions are made. To conclude, implications and recommendations stemming from this discussion are considered.     

THE “EYE OF THE BEHOLDER”: PROFESSIONAL OPINIONS ABOUT THE BEST INTERESTS OF A CHILD

Child custody evaluations (CCEs) are a central feature of parenting litigation in many North American jurisdictions. However, there has been little recent research comparing CCE decisions about children's interests with decisions made by judges. This article presents empirical research about the extent to which Ontario judges accept custody and access recommendations from CCEs employed by Ontario's Office of the Children's Lawyer. The central finding was that the judges fully agreed with the CCEs only about half of the time. Possible explanations for this finding are explored, the most salient of which is the effect of delay in Ontario family litigation. In conclusion, the article suggests that a more efficient synthesis of the judicial and CCE decision‐making processes might be more consonant with the best interests of children involved in these disputes.     

From Bail to Jail: The Effect of Jail Capacity on Bail Decisions

One of the more important decisions made by judges in the criminal justice system is the bail decision. Factors that judges take into consideration when making a bail decision, such as seriousness of the offense, flight risk, and public safety, are typically seen by researchers as the primary determinants of such a decision. However, one aspect that researchers have not studied extensively—rated jail capacity – could play an important role in a judge’s decision. Overcrowding in jails leads to numerous problems, both for the offender and the system itself, so judges may be more willing to release offenders into the community during the pretrial period if the local jails are overcrowded. The current study examines the effect of rated jail capacity on decisions regarding bail amounts, release on recognizance (ROR), financial release, and conditional release in eight Florida counties. Results indicate that rated jail capacity plays a role in judges’ bail decisions, suggesting that judges are concerned about housing more pretrial offenders in crowded jails.     

“Cannot Decide”: The Fine Line Between Appropriate Inconclusive Determinations Versus Unjustifiably Deciding Not To Decide

Inconclusive decisions, deciding not to decide, are decisions. We present a cognitive model which takes into account that decisions are an outcome of interactions and intersections between the actual data and human cognition. Using this model it is suggested under which circumstances inconclusive decisions are justified and even warranted (reflecting proper caution and meta‐cognitive abilities in recognizing limited abilities), and, conversely, under what circumstances inconclusive decisions are unjustifiable and should not be permitted. The model further explores the limitations and problems in using categorical decision‐making when the data are actually a continuum. Solutions are suggested within the forensic fingerprinting domain, but they can be applied to other forensic domains, and, with modifications, may also be applied to other expert domains.     

Fight or flight: Integral emotions and violent intentions

The effect of proximate emotions on risk perceptions is of central importance to criminal decision‐making theory, but has been understudied. We investigate the role of two integral (situational specific) emotional responses, anger and fear, in a decision‐making context regarding the choice to commit assault. We draw on dual‐process models of information processing and appraisal theory to propose a theoretical model in which integral emotions influence decisions and behavior. Using data from an experiment embedded in a survey to a nationwide sample of adults (N = 804), we test the interrelated roles of anger, fear, and traditional rational choice considerations on the intention to commit assault. We find a strong direct association between emotions and intentions to commit assault. Additionally, anger and fear moderate the effect of cognitive deliberations on behavioral intentions and provide a lens through which to evaluate a criminogenic opportunity.     

Assessing Danger: What Judges Need To Know

Every day, judges are faced with decisions regarding intimate partner violence (IPV) victims' requests for protection orders, custody arrangements, and visitation schedules. To make informed decisions, judges must understand victims' risk for future violence. This mixed method study explores the extent to which protection order petitions (n=169) communicate victims' current danger and future risk of violence. Methods included interviews coupled with an archival review of court petitions. Findings suggest judges are inadequately prepared to render decisions to improve victim safety in the absence of standardized risk assessments. The Danger Assessment provides an evidence-based solution to routinize intake interviews with victims petitioning the court.     

Detained: A Study of Immigration Bond Hearings

Immigration judges make consequential decisions that fundamentally affect the basic life chances of thousands of noncitizens and their family members every year. Yet, we know very little about how immigration judges make their decisions, including decisions about whether to release or detain noncitizens pending the completion of their immigration cases. Using original data on long‐term immigrant detainees, I examine for the first time judicial decision making in immigration bond hearings. I find that there are extremely wide variations in the average bond grant rates and bond amount decisions among judges in the study sample. What are the determinants of these bond decisions? My analysis shows that the odds of being granted bond are more than 3.5 times higher for detainees represented by attorneys than those who appeared pro se, net of other relevant factors. My analysis also shows that the detainees' prior criminal history is the only significant legally relevant factor in both the grant/deny and bond amount decisions, net of other relevant factors. This finding points to the need for further research on whether and how immigration courts might be exercising crime control through administrative proceedings.     

Juvenile Court Judges' Perceptions of What Factors Affect Juvenile Offenders' Likelihood of Rehabilitation

An instrument was developed to measure whether judges perceive the likelihood of rehabilitation to be influenced by extra‐legal factors. A self‐administered questionnaire was sent to 1,040 juvenile court judges across the United States. Two indices‐extra‐legal and legal‐were created to measure the relationship between judges' perceptions and the factors they consider in their transfer decisions. Primary analysis used frequencies, cross‐tabulations, and measures of association. The factors that judges may consider in their transfer decisions are specified and vary according to state statutes. Extra‐legal factors are never included in the statutes as factors that may be considered. Nonetheless, the findings suggest that judges consider extra‐legal factors in determining an offender's likelihood of rehabilitation. The results suggest that both male and non‐minority judges' perceive that extra‐legal characteristics affect an offender's likelihood of rehabilitation. All judges seem to believe that family structure and prior record are almost equally important factors in determining offenders' likelihood of rehabilitation. Thus, although judges consider legal factors in determining an offender's likelihood of rehabilitation, they also include criteria not explicitly permitted by law.     

Judges’ sentencing decisions with older offenders

Older offenders tend to be treated with more leniency in the criminal justice system. A number of studies show that older offenders are less likely to be incarcerated, and when they are incarcerated, are more likely to receive shorter sentences. However, to date, no research has directly examined why such leniency occurs. This study asked U.S. state trial court judges to reflect on their sentencing practices with older offenders and to rate the factors considered most important when sentencing this population. Responses were received from 212 judges. Only 31% of judges acknowledged treating older offenders with greater leniency. These judges also indicated that they predominantly rely on legal factors when making decisions about sentencing with older offenders rather than factors specifically associated with age. Only cognitive impairment was identified by judges as one of the five most important factors to consider when sentencing older offenders. These results are discussed in terms of judges’ awareness of how they weigh information to make legal decisions. The influence of judges’ age and attitudes about aging on sentencing decisions are also explored.     

Decision Making and Justice

This article considers how judges can improve decision making, especially in cases that involve children in the family court. It looks specifically at improvements that are being implemented in England and Wales following a major review of family justice in 2011. All judges need to be well‐trained and well‐informed if they are to make the best‐quality decisions they can. Three principles underpin the approach to improving judicial decision making, which must be systematic, evidence based, and tested, and the evidence that informs judicial decisions must be robust. Collaboration among professionals in the development of good practice, its dissemination, and its application should be the acknowledged goal, and it should involve the views and perceptions of the young people and families involved.     

Faith in the Court: Religious Out‐Groups and the Perceived Legitimacy of Judicial Decisions

The question of whether judges’ personal characteristics and values bias their decision making has long been debated, yet far less attention has been given to how personal characteristics affect public perceptions of bias in their decision making. Even genuinely objective judges may be perceived as procedurally biased by the public. We hypothesize that membership in a religious out‐group will elicit stronger public perceptions of biased decision making. Using a survey experiment that varies a judge's religious orientation and ruling in a hypothetical Establishment Clause case, we find strong evidence that judges’ religious characteristics affect the perceived legitimacy of their decisions. Identifying a judge as an atheist (a religious out‐group) decreases trust in the court, while identifying the judge as a committed Christian has no bearing on legitimacy. These results are even stronger among respondents who report attending church more often. Thus, we argue that perceptions of bias are conditioned on judges’ in‐group/out‐group status.     

HOW JUDGES DECIDE WHETHER SOCIAL PARENTS HAVE PARENTAL RIGHTS: A FIVE‐FACTOR TYPOLOGY

Courts have issued conflicting rulings regarding the rights (e.g., custody, visitation) and responsibilities (e.g., child support) of non‐biological gay parents. This analysis establishes a typology of five factors that most commonly influence judges' decisions. These factors include: interpretation of parenting statutes, legislative intent, parental intent, legal documents establishing parenthood, and the child's best interests. Despite these common themes, there is still much discrepancy among court rulings. Based on this analysis, there are steps parents can take to protect their legal rights and living arrangements. Finally, policy suggestions are offered for courts and lawmakers. These legal actors can take steps (e.g., clarifying statutes) that would provide certainty for families in case of parental separation or the biological parent's death.     

Naturalistic decision making in forensic science: toward a better understanding of decision making by forensic team leaders

This study uses the naturalistic decision-making (NDM) perspective to examine how Dutch forensic team leaders (i.e., the officers in charge of criminal forensic research from the crime scene until the use of laboratory assistance) make decisions in real-life settings and identifies the contextual factors that might influence those decisions. First, a focus group interview was conducted to identify four NDM mechanisms in day-to-day forensic decision making. Second, a serious game was conducted to examine the influence of three of these contextual mechanisms. The results uncovered that forensic team leaders (i) were attracted to obtain further information when more information was initially made available, (ii) were likely to devote more attention to emotionally charged cases, and (iii) used not only forensic evidence in the decision making but also tactical, unverified information of the police inquiry. Interestingly, the measured contextual influences did not deviate significantly from a control group of laypeople.     

The Influence of Administrative Law Judge and Political Appointee Decisions on Appellate Courts in National Labor Relations Board Cases

Scholars have long been simultaneously concerned with the factors that influence appellate court decision making and the level of deference that the courts allow for agencies. However, scholars have treated administrative agencies as unitary actors with a single level of decision making, but in reality agency decisions involve input from multiple actors within the agency. I argue that appellate courts rely more heavily on decisions made by actors in the bureaucracy with greater levels of expertise and who are less politically motivated as cues in their decision making. This theory is bolstered by legal precedent in the area of administrative law that suggests courts should more heavily rely on the expert judgment of administrative judges. Thus, as a result of their increased expertise, appearance of political neutrality, and institutional support, courts will be more reliant on decisions issued by administrative law judges (ALJs) than those issued by the political appointees as cues in their decision making. Using over 300 unfair labor practice decisions issued by the federal appeals courts on review of cases from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB or Board), I develop a model of appeals court decision making in unfair labor practice cases as a function of the initial decision of the ALJ, the final order of the political appointees of the NLRB, case characteristics, the ideology of the deciding appeals court panel, Supreme Court influence, and economic factors. Though the ideology of the court plays a role in its decision making, cues from ALJ decision making and that of the Board weigh more heavily in appellate court outcomes. However, cues from ALJ decisions play the most consistent role in appellate court decision making, even in more difficult cases. This has important implications for agency strategy in courts and suggests that future research should consider the influence of lower‐level decision making over appellate court decision making in the area of administrative law.     

A DUAL‐SYSTEMS APPROACH FOR UNDERSTANDING DIFFERENTIAL SUSCEPTIBILITY TO PROCESSES OF PEER INFLUENCE

The distinct peer‐based perspectives of deviant normative influence and unstructured/unsupervised socializing with friends contend that adolescents rely on different information when deciding to offend, with the former positing that individuals offend after considering the longer term consequences of behavior, and the latter positing that decisions to offend derive from situational stimuli. We argue that these processes can be organized under a dual‐systems framework of decision making, which leads to the hypothesis that individuals at the edges of impulsivity should be differentially vulnerable to these peer influence processes because of their tendency to rely on only one system of decision making. We use two large data sets to test this hypothesis: a nationally representative sample of adolescents from the AddHealth study (N = ～9,000) and a pooled panel data set of adolescents from the Gang Resistance Education and Training (G.R.E.A.T.) evaluation (N = 1,172). The results of longitudinal negative binomial analyses indicate that normative influence by deviant peers has a stronger effect on delinquency for adolescents with low impulsivity than it does for individuals with high impulsivity. Differences in the informal socializing with peers coefficients are less clear and offer minimal support for our predictions.     

Lawlessness in the Federal Sentencing Process: A Test for Uniformity and Consistency in Sentence Outcomes

One of the important goals of the federal sentencing guidelines was to reduce inter‐judge disparity in sentencing. In this paper, we test the assumption that structuring discretion produced uniformity in federal sentencing and consistency in the process by which judges arrive at the appropriate sentence. We also examine whether background characteristics of judges affect the sentences they impose on similarly situated offenders. We used hierarchical linear modeling, nesting the offenders in the judges that sentenced them in order to examine the sentencing decisions of federal judges in three U.S. District Courts. While we found that significant variation between judges in sentencing is largely accounted for by our level 1 characteristics, we also found that judges arrive at decisions regarding the appropriate sentence in different ways, by attaching differential weights to several of the legally relevant case characteristics and legally irrelevant offender characteristics.     

THE ELUSIVE PURSUIT OF SOLOMON: FALTERING STEPS TOWARD THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD

This article provides a brief critique of presumptions about parenting and children seen through the lens of family law. It argues that, historically, decisions largely followed gender‐based and/or moral presumptions of the day and that sometimes these were in tension with each other. Sometimes, too, as in the biblical story of Solomon's judgment, biological parenthood was contested and/or gender did not provide a ready answer. The article argues that, as children's rights and the best interests of the child increasingly came to dominate the decision‐making rhetoric, a Solomon‐like belief has nonetheless persisted, that judicial ingenuity and sophisticated investigative resources can determine the underlying truth of a dispute and lead to the correct outcome. The evidence, however, points in the direction of significant predictive limitations to the legal, social, and psychological knowledge bases supporting most postseparation parenting decisions. It is argued that what is needed is a formal shift in emphasis from a somewhat idealized commitment to discovering the truth in most contested cases to a focus on good decision‐making processes. It is suggested that most transitional families are best served by an emphasis on good, respectful processes associated with good‐enough decisions that formally acknowledge the limitations of our capacity to predict. Good processes and good‐enough decisions are in turn best supported by a clear emphasis on children as individual agents, who, though dependent on adults, are entitled to the full panoply of human rights.     

JUDICIAL ROTATION AS CENTRIPETAL FORCE: SENTENCING IN THE COURT COMMUNITIES OF SOUTH CAROLINA*

Courts as communities theory emphasizes the sentencing differences that can arise between localities within a single state. The results of published studies have highlighted how local differences emerge based on informal sociological and political processes defined by the communities perspective. The findings from recent quantitative studies from South Carolina have revealed notably less county variation in sentencing than has been observed elsewhere. I use qualitative interviews with 13 South Carolina trial judges to investigate sentencing processes and to shed light on these findings. The interviews explore the state's legal structure and culture, including the practice of circuit rotation in which judges travel among counties holding court. The results suggest rotation serves as a centripetal force of sentencing culture, homogenizing what might otherwise be a more varied collection of county‐specific norms. Rotation leads to increased uniformity through judge shopping and the cross‐pollination of ideas and norms. Defendants can strategically judge shop and plead in front of a lenient judge—a process that gives rise to the term “plea judge,” which is a label for the most lenient judges who sentence a large number of defendants. Rotation also increases the interactions among judges and prosecutors, expanding networks and grapevines, and leading to cross‐pollination and the sharing of ideas.     

Punitive Damage Decision Making: The Decisions of Citizens and Trial Court Judges

Some states have allocated the authority to determine the amount of punitive damages to judges rather than to juries. This study explored the determination of damages by jury-eligible citizens and trial court judges. The punitive damage awards of both groups were of similar magnitude and variability. The compensatory damages of jurors were marginally lower but, in some conditions, were more variable than the compensatory damage awards of judges. Both groups appropriately utilized information about both the actual and potential severity of the harm to the plaintiff in determining punitive damages and used only the actual severity of the injury in determining compensatory damages. The punitive damage awards of both groups were influenced by the wealth of the defendant, but the compensatory damage awards of judges were marginally more influenced by defendant wealth than those of citizens. The results are discussed in the context of proposals for punitive damages reform.     

TARGET CHOICE DURING EXTREME EVENTS: A DISCRETE SPATIAL CHOICE MODEL OF THE 2011 LONDON RIOTS

Riots are extreme events, and much of the early research on rioting suggested that the decision making of rioters was far from rational and could only be understood from the perspective of a collective mind. In the current study, we derive and test a set of expectations regarding rioter spatial decision making developed from theories originally intended to explain patterns of urban crime when law and order prevail—crime pattern and social disorganization theory—and consider theories of collective behavior and contagion. To do this, we use data for all riot‐related incidents that occurred in London in August 2011 that were detected by the police. Unlike most studies of victimization, we use a random utility model to examine simultaneously how the features of the destinations selected by rioters, the origins of their journeys, and the characteristics of the offenders influence offender spatial decision making. The results demonstrate that rioter target choices were far from random and provide support for all three types of theory, but for crime pattern theory in particular. For example, rioters were more likely to engage in the disorder close to their home location and to select areas that contained routine activity nodes and transport hubs, and they were less likely to cross the Thames River. In terms of contagion, rioters were found to be more likely to target areas that had experienced rioting in the previous 24 hours. From a policy perspective, the findings provide insight into the types of areas that may be most vulnerable during riots and why this is the case, and when particular areas are likely to be at an elevated risk of this type of disorder.