Marder, ID and Pina-Sánchez, J (2020) Nudge the judge? Theorising the interaction between heuristics, sentencing guidelines and sentence clustering. Criminology and Criminal Justice, 20 (4). pp. 399-415. ISSN 1748-8958
Abstract
Although it has long been acknowledged that heuristics influence judicial decision-making, researchers have yet to explore how sentencing guidelines might interact with heuristics to shape sentencing decisions. This article contributes to addressing this gap in the literature in three ways: firstly, by considering how heuristics might help produce the phenomenon of sentence clustering, in which a significant proportion of sentences are concentrated around a small number of outcomes; secondly, by reflecting on the role of sentencing guidelines as a feature of the environment within which sentencing decisions are made; and thirdly, by analysing the guidelines from Minnesota and from England and Wales, theorising how their content might interact with heuristics to make clustering more or less likely. Ultimately, we argue that sentencing guidelines likely affect the role played by heuristics in shaping sentencing decisions and, consequently, that their design should be informed by research evidence from the decision sciences.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | (c) 2018, The Author(s). This is an author produced version of a paper published in Criminology and Criminal Justice. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications. |
Keywords: | choice architecture; heuristics; judicial decision-making; nudge theory; sentence clustering; sentencing; sentencing guidelines |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Law (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 16 Nov 2018 13:52 |
Last Modified: | 15 Dec 2020 10:15 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/1748895818818869 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:138719 |