6 - Judges' thoughts on sentencing the multiple offender

Summary

This chapter presents and analyzes the judges' responses to the sentencing problems testing the decision model describing how effective sentences are determined for multiple offenders whose counts are separate transactions and offence categories. The data comprising the judges' answers take three forms: (1) quanta of sentence imposed for the cases comprising the sentencing problems; (2) verbal protocols in the form of immediate retrospective reports of their thoughts as they determined sentences for the cases; (3) reflective retrospective reports comprising direct comments on the validity of the decision model's principles and working rules as they apply to each of the sentencing problems. It is clear from the discussion of the role and nature of each of these three sets of data in the previous chapter that they are complementary for the purposes of interpretation. For example, the quanta of sentence imposed by a judge may be consistent with the model's predictions and yet the thought processes governing his decision quite at variance with the principles and rules hypothesized by the model to underlie the solution to that problem. It was appropriate, therefore, that the three sets of data be analyzed together. The data comprising the sentences for the cases and the associated verbal protocols are from the first sentencing exercise and the data base of reflective reports is from the second exercise.