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Having Their Day in Court: Defendant Evaluations of the Fairness of their Treatment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1978

Jonathan D. Casper
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Abstract

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Defendants in criminal cases were asked to evaluate the fairness of the treatment they received. Several correlates of defendant evaluations are discussed, including “predisposing” variables (race, past record, and political alienation) and “case-specific” variables (sentence received, disposition by trial or plea, and a defendant's sense of how his sentence compares with those given to others). All are related to a sense of fair treatment, sentence received and comparison level most strongly. The implications of these findings for recent discussions of plea bargaining and greater sentence equity are discussed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , Winter 1978 , pp. 237 - 251
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

For their help in analyzing the data and for comments on this article, I should like to thank Dick Brody, Paul Sniderman, Dan Okimoto, John Manley, and Steve Woolpert.

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