Sociolegal scholarship has long noted the many ways in which the law is interpreted and selectively applied by human decision-makers. Yet, the processes underlying one of the most significant discretionary waypoints in the criminal legal process – prosecutorial charging decisions – remain opaque. Using data from interviews and focus groups with prosecutors in three midsized jurisdictions, we propose a model of charging that integrates legal considerations, social identity, and organizational constraints. We find that felony prosecutors weave together legal and extralegal factors, often relying heavily on criminal history, to evaluate defendants’ moral character. Based on their evaluation of a defendant’s character, prosecutors charge strategically to secure a final disposition and sentence they view as appropriate for the defendant. Prosecutors’ identities and experiences act as lenses through which they interpret case facts in their evaluation of defendants’ character. However, the level of discretion provided by their chief prosecutor and the culture of the court community in which they work condition the process by which prosecutors achieve their desired outcomes for cases.

Bilinguals experience diminished emotion when using their foreign compared with their native language. The diminished emotion has been shown to lead to more lenient moral evaluations in a foreign language. Here we show that non-native speakers of English are less sensitive to emotional mitigating circumstances of a crime than native speakers, presumably because of the diminished experience emotion. This can lead non-native speakers to provide harsher, rather than more lenient, evaluations. Native and non-native speakers of English recommended sentence duration for crimes committed because of mitigating emotional circumstances (e.g., fraud to pay spouse's medical treatment) or for selfish reasons (e.g., buying luxury goods). Native English speakers differentiated more between the two types of scenarios than non-native speakers did. The study thus provides preliminary evidence that processing information in a foreign language can influence decisions, and that the directionality of the effect depends on the role of emotion in the context.

Tolerance of transgressions can influence the social cognitive and moral development of children and adolescents. Given the prevalent tolerance for bribery throughout the developing world and in China, the present research identified bribery as a serious transgression and investigated the various effects of moral evaluations and descriptive norms on transgression tolerance with increasing age. Thus, two studies examined these effects among primary, middle, and high school students (N = 972, 10-, 13-, and 16-year-olds). In Study 1, students’ transgression tolerance was negatively influenced by moral evaluations, and no age trend emerged. However, students reported more transgression tolerance with age owing to their increasing understanding of descriptive norms. In Study 2, the descriptive norms were manipulated: individuals in the high descriptive norm condition showed greater transgression tolerance than those in the low descriptive norm condition. An increasing tolerance of transgressions was observed only for those in the high descriptive norm condition. The effect of descriptive norms was found to contribute to the transgression tolerance trend.