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Uncertainty and Condemnation. An Experimental Study on Lay and Expert Intuitions Regarding the Object of Criminal Punishment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2024

Piotr Bystranowski Open the ORCID record for Piotr Bystranowski [Opens in a new window] ,
Bartosz Janik Open the ORCID record for Bartosz Janik [Opens in a new window]  and
Maciej Próchnicki Open the ORCID record for Maciej Próchnicki [Opens in a new window]
Piotr Bystranowski
Affiliation:
Researcher, Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. [email protected]
Bartosz Janik
Affiliation:
Assistant professor, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. [email protected]
Maciej Próchnicki*
Affiliation:
Researcher, Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics, Jagiellonian University, Grodzka 52, room 21, 31-044 Kraków Poland. Telephone: 0048 12 663 11 00
*
E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

The object of criminal punishment (what exactly an offender is punished for) is a central construct of criminal law theory, but it remains hard to identify in many contexts. This is especially relevant in the case of proxy crimes—offenses that criminalize behavior that does not seem wrongful per se but stands in for some other hard-to-prove wrongdoing. What is the object of punishment imposed on a person convicted of a proxy crime? Is it the criminalized conduct itself or the primary wrongdoing (which could not have been proven)? Our experimental study demonstrates that people tend to find a defendant guilty of a proxy crime most frequently when there is an indication of the primary wrongdoing as opposed to being charged with a primary offense in the context of the same evidence and being charged with a proxy in the absence of suspicion of the primary offense. However, we find evidence of discrepancies between laypeople and legal experts: the former seeing the object of punishment in a rather naively legalistic way, and the latter adhering to an instrumental vision. This challenges theories that postulate that the task of criminal law is to send messages that are understandable to both legal officials and citizens.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 49 , Issue 4 , November 2024 , pp. 1964 - 1989
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

The research was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland, grant no. 2016/23/N/HS5/00928 (Piotr Bystranowski), grant no. 2020/36/C/HS5/00111 (Bartosz Janik), and grant no. 2017/25/N/HS5/00944 (Maciej Próchnicki). The work on revisions of this paper was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the H2020 European Research Council research and innovation program (Grant agreement 805498; Piotr Bystranowski & Maciej Próchnicki). During the preparation of the revisions, Maciej Próchnicki was a stipendist of the Foundation for Polish Science (START 2023 program). The authors benefited from presenting other iterations of this work at the Evidence in Law and Ethics (ELE2019) conference in Kraków and at the Special Workshop on Empirical Approaches and their Importance for the Philosophy of Law at the 2022 IVR World Congress in Bucharest. We would like to thank Carlton Patrick and two anonymous referees for insightful comments on earlier versions of this work.

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