Equity in Court Dispositions (From Evaluating Performance of Criminal Justice Agencies, P 183-207, 1983, Gordon P Whitaker and Charles D Phillips, ed. - See NCJ-92180)

• NCJ Number: 92187
• Author(s): K A Hardy
• Date Published: 1983
• Length: 25 pages
• Sale Source: Sage Publications, Inc
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This paper examines equity in court dispositions by discussing the meaning of equal treatment under the law, reviewing previous research, offering a critique of this research, and presenting a preliminary analysis of data on a sample of North Carolina homicide cases to illustrate some of the issues raised in the critique.

Abstract

The notion of equal treatment under the law does not refer to equality of outcome irrespective of the circumstances of a case but rather to the equal treatment of those similarly situated with respect to the issue before the court. Moreover, the circumstances used to judge the similarity of cases must be those deemed appropriate under the law; they cannot be factors without legal foundation, such as a defendant's race. Overall equity in the administration of laws by the court system must be evidenced at four major decision points: indictment, plea negotiations, a trial verdict, and sentencing. Research dealing with the equal treatment of defendants under the law has focused on extralegal variables impacting court decisionmaking, notably discrimination based on defendant's race or the victim's race and class or gender bias. A major problem of this research is its general failure to control relationships between extralegal variables and outcome measures for relevant legal variables such as type of offense, prior criminal record, and the strength of evidence against the defendant. A subset of this general problem is the selection of a limited range of offenses to test for the effects of extralegal variables. Many studies also do not control for legal process variables such as appointed versus retained counsel and jury trial versus plea bargaining. Contextual variables are also often omitted, and most studies examine only a single stage of the process. To illustrate the need for careful examination of the flow of cases through the court system, a brief, preliminary analysis of data gathered on indictments and plea bargains in homicide cases in North Carolina is presented. Tabular data and 115 references are provided.