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An empirical study of judges’ sentencing practices: Appraisal analysis of six sentencing remarks for murder cases in England and Wales

Dai, Xin 2020. An empirical study of judges’ sentencing practices: Appraisal analysis of six sentencing remarks for murder cases in England and Wales. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University.
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Abstract

Studies on sentencing in England and Wales are dominated by the perspective of viewing sentencing as governed by penal philosophies, and judges’ sentencing is regarded as lacking coherence due to their lack of consensus on which penal philosophies to follow. Contrary to this perspective, the current study views sentencing as a social practice. In my corpus of six sentencing remarks for murder cases in England and Wales, I found that judges’ sentencing practices are patterned based on analyses of how they evaluate offenders and their offences. The six sentencing remarks were selected to ensure (at least to a large extent) that the different sentencing results of the six cases are a reflection of how judges exercise their sentencing discretion. The current study finds that judges’ deployment of appraisal resources and strategies across the six sentencing remarks correlate with their sentencing decisions. In the sentencing of convictions for murder in England and Wales, judges first need to select a statutory starting point, and then they have the discretion to take into consideration any relevant aggravating and mitigating factors to finally arrive at a minimum term. The current study finds that when judges set the minimum term below (text 1) or well above (texts 5 and 6) the starting point they make more evaluations and qualitatively different evaluations, and deploy certain appraisal strategies, compared with when they set the minimum terms just a few years above the starting point (texts 2, 3 and 4). Such patterns reveal that the statutory starting point, as one of the prescriptive schemes to bind judges’ sentencing discretion, is exerting its influences on judges’ sentencing practices, despite judges have the discretion to arrive at a minimum term of any length irrespective of the starting point. This study further argues that the patterns reveal that judges perceive the public and the Court of Appeal as two important audiences of their sentencing remarks. In other words, judges’ perception of the audiences shapes how they evaluate offenders and their offences. When the patterns are found to correlate with judges’ sentencing decisions, it further argues that judge’ perception of the two important audiences shapes their sentencing practices.

Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
Date Type: Completion
Status: Unpublished
Schools: English, Communication and Philosophy
Date of First Compliant Deposit: 27 July 2020
Last Modified: 27 Jul 2021 01:30
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/133748

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