England grants unusually broad responsibility for sentencing of criminal offenders to voluntary part-time lay magistrates who, like their legally trained professional colleagues, sentence a wide range of offenders. Using simulated cases, archival analyses, and observational techniques, this article compares the sentencing decisions of the lay and professional magistrates in London. The study reveals no evidence of the lay preference for more severe sentencing that is typically shown in public opinion polls. The extent to which legal training, court experience, panel decisionmaking and role within the court system can explain the relative leniency of the lay magistrates are considered Consistent with results from other studies, these findings suggests that when laypersons assign sentences to particular offenders rather than express generalized satisfaction or dissatisfaction with current sentencing practices, laypersons are no more punitive than professional judges.

The treatment of white-collar offenders by the criminal justice system has been a central concern since the concept of white-collar crime was first introduced In general, it has been assumed that those higher up the social hierarchy have an advantage in every part of the legal process, including the punishment they receive as white-collar criminals. In a controversial study of white-collar crime sentencing in the federal district courts, Wheeler, Weisburd, and Bode contradicted this assumption when they found that those of higher status were more likely to be imprisoned and, when sentenced to prison, were likely to receive longer prison terms than comparable offenders of lower status. While they argued that results were consistent with “what those who do the sentencing often say about it,” their analyses failed to control for the role of social class in the sentencing process. In this article we reanalyze the Wheeler et al sentencing data, including both measures of socioeconomic status and class position. Our findings show that class position does have an independent influence on judicial sentencing behavior. But this effect does not demand revision in the major findings reported in the earlier study.