NCJ Number
198753
Journal
Justice Quarterly Volume: 19 Issue: 4 Dated: December 2002 Pages: 633-671
Date Published
December 2002
Length
39 pages
Annotation
This article addresses the ways in which district and circuit of adjudication affect sentencing outcomes for Federal drug-trafficking offenses.
Abstract
After arguing that the location or jurisdiction where court decisions are made often influences different decision making standards, the author discusses the ways in which Federal courts have been organized and administered geographically throughout the United States. Contending that differences in sentencing outcomes across jurisdictions may result from environmental factors such as differing populations of defendants, crime rates, caseloads, and other factors, the author describes the social worlds and organizational context theoretical perspectives used to guide this study. Analyzing the myriad of multilevel factors involved in influencing sentencing decisions, the author evaluated the effects that court district and circuit adjudication had on the lengths of sentences for Federal drug-trafficking offenses. Analyzing various unconditional and random coefficients models, the author found that sentencing outcomes for post-guidelines Federal drug-trafficking cases varied by both district and circuit of adjudication and that both of these factors influenced the final sentence length imposed on offenders. The author also found that the effect of a defendant's race on sentence length varied significantly by district. This research demonstrates that district and circuit courts do not merely function as “cookie-cutter” institutional subunits of the Federal court system and that district effects are not simply functions of population context, organizational maintenance, or political rationality. Instead, the effects of district appear to reflect variation in the jurisdictional embeddedness of the structured sentencing criteria. Tables, figures, references