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来源类型 | Discussion paper |
规范类型 | 论文 |
来源ID | DP11888 |
DP11888 The Fall of Capital Punishment and the Rise of Prisons: How Punishment Severity Affects Jury Verdicts | |
Randi Hjalmarsson; Anna Bindler | |
发表日期 | 2017-03-04 |
出版年 | 2017 |
语种 | 英语 |
摘要 | This paper studies the effect of punishment severity on jury decision-making using a large archival data set from the Old Bailey Criminal Court in London from 1715 to 1900. We take advantage of two natural experiments in English history, which result in sharp decreases in punishment severity: the offense specific abolition of capital punishment in the 1800s and the temporary and unexpected halt of penal transportation during the American Revolution. Using a difference-in-differences design to study the former and a pre-post design to study the latter, we find that decreasing expected punishment (especially via the end of the death penalty), had a large, significant and permanent impact on jury behavior, generally leading to the jury being ‘harsher’. Moreover, we find that the size of the effect differs with defendants’ gender and criminal history. These results raise concerns about the impartiality of juries as well as the implicit assumption often made when designing and evaluating criminal justice policies today – that the chance of conviction is independent of the harshness of the penalty. |
主题 | Economic History ; Labour Economics ; Public Economics |
关键词 | Jury Verdict Conviction Punishment severity Expected punishment Crime Death penalty English history |
URL | https://cepr.org/publications/dp11888 |
来源智库 | Centre for Economic Policy Research (United Kingdom) |
资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/540700 |
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Randi Hjalmarsson,Anna Bindler. DP11888 The Fall of Capital Punishment and the Rise of Prisons: How Punishment Severity Affects Jury Verdicts. 2017. |
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