Effects of Necessary,Sufficient, and Indirect Causation on Judgments of Criminal Liability

Law and Human Behavior - When has one essentially committed a crime? When are one's actions necessary for its occurrence or sufficient to bring it about under normal circumstances? Participants...     

Community Perceptions of Allowable Counterforce in Self-Defense and Defense of Property

Law and Human Behavior - What level of force do people believe is appropriate to use in self-defense and defense of property? One answer is that a person may use only the bare minimum of force...     

Punishment and Beyond: Achieving Justice Through the Satisfaction of Multiple Goals

We investigated the hypothesis that people's need for punishment does not preclude a desire for restorative sanctions that address the repairing of the harm to victims and communities caused by wrongdoing. Study 1 showed that although people felt it was important to punish the offender to achieve justice, they viewed additional justice goals as equally necessary. Study 2 revealed that people viewed sanctions as differentially able to fulfill various justice goals. Study 3 showed that the target on which respondents focused—the offender, victim, or community—determined which sanctions they selected to achieve justice; and that people did tend, by default, to focus on punishing the offender when responding to crime. These findings, taken together, suggest that people view the satisfaction of multiple justice goals as an appropriate and just response to wrongdoing, which allows for a possible reconciliation between the "conflicting" goals of restorative and retributive justice.     

Morality Influences How People Apply the Ignorance of the Law Defense

In four empirical studies, we showed that laypeople apply the ignorance of the law defense differently depending on the perceived morality of the defendant's course of conduct at the time of the illegal act. Moral and neutral defendants who pled ignorance of the law were afforded leniency, whereas immoral defendants were sentenced as though they were not ignorant, even when defendants in all three conditions violated identical laws. These findings suggest that laypeople adopt a just deserts approach to criminal law, which influences their responsiveness to a criminal defendant's claim to be ignorant of the law. We discuss the implications of these findings for criminal law and argue that legal doctrine should reflect laypeople's moral intuitions.     

A victim-centered approach to justice? Victim satisfaction effects on third-party punishments

Three studies investigated whether victims' satisfaction with a restorative justice process influenced third-party assignments of punishment. Participants evaluated criminal offenses and victims' reactions to an initial restorative justice conference, and were later asked to indicate their support for additional punishment of the offender. Across the three studies, we found that victim satisfaction (relative to dissatisfaction) attenuates people's desire to seek offender punishment, regardless of offense severity (Study 2) or conflicting reports from a third-party observer (Study 3). This relationship was explained by the informational value of victim satisfaction: Participants inferred that victims felt closure and that offenders experienced value reform, both of which elevated participants' satisfaction with the restorative justice outcome. The informational value communicated by victim satisfaction, and its criminal justice implications, are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Incapacitation and Just Deserts as Motives for Punishment

Law and Human Behavior - What motivates a person's desire to punish actors who commit intentional, counternormative harms? Two possible answers are a just deserts motive or a desire to...     

Restoration and Retribution: How Including Retributive Components Affects the Acceptability of Restorative Justice Procedures

Two studies investigated people’s perceptions of the acceptability of restorative justice procedures for handling crimes that differ in severity. Results from Study 1 supported our hypothesis that as crimes increase in seriousness, people require a restorative justice procedure that also has a possible retributive component (i.e. a prison sentence). Study 1 also demonstrated that individuals assigned lower prison sentences for offenders who successfully completed a restorative procedure as compared to a traditional court procedure. The results from Study 2 replicated those from Study 1, as well as demonstrating that offenders who failed to successfully complete the restorative procedure received no reduction in prison sentence. These findings suggest that in order for citizens to view a restorative justice procedure as an acceptable alternative to the traditional court system for serious crimes, the procedure must allow for the option of some retributive measures.

Community standards of criminal liability and the insanity defense

Two experiments (N=71) compare lay standards of insanity to standards incorporated in American legal codes. In Experiment 1, case vignettes provided only legally relevant information about defendants' degrees of impairment in cognition or in behavioral control. Respondents' judgments of criminal liability ornot guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) reflected an exculpatory standard of substantial impairment in both cognition and control. In Experiment 2, case vignettes provided realistic information about defendants' psychiatric diagnoses; respondents had to infer levels of cognitive and control impairment. Results showed that respondents made highly idiosyncratic inferences based on diagnostic categories, but once made, these inferences predicted NGRI judgments. Implications of the concordance between laypeople's rules for assigning NGRI verdicts and the rules used in American legal codes are discussed.Daniel Bailis gratefully acknowledges the support of Public Health Service grant No. 5T32 MH18021-07 for Research Training in Social Psychology during the time in which the present research was conducted. John Darley wished to acknowledge the generous support of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and Princeton University. Study 2 presents work done for the Princeton University undergraduate thesis of Tracy Waxman. The authors are grateful to Norman J. Finkel, Valerie Hans, and three anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft on this article.Northwestern University.     

The severity of intermediate penal sanctions: A psychophysical scaling approach for obtaining community perceptions

The use of intensive supervision programs (ISPs) and other forms of intermediate penal sanctions is increasing in the United States. This paper describes a preliminary investigation of the extent to which informed New Jersey residents believe that intermediate sanctions that are currently being implemented in their state are severe. Using cross-modality matching of magnitude estimation techniques adopted from psychophysics, we obtained severity ratings of 32 sentences across six sentencing modalities (ISPs, probation, imprisonment, home detention, weekend sentencing, and fines) from respondents who had been briefed beforehand about what these sentences entail. Results indicate that our respondents agree that ISPs, weekend sentencing, and home detention have retributive bite and may be accepted as sentences in their own right. Probation was seen as being relatively lenient, while imprisonment was seen as highly severe.