The relationship between victim impact statements and judicial decision making: An archival analysis of sentencing outcomes.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Victim impact statements (VISs) are testimonies that convey the emotional, physical, and financial harm that victims have suffered as the result of a crime. Although VISs are often presented to the court at sentencing, it is unclear whether they impact judicial decisions regarding sentencing. HYPOTHESES: We did not have any formal a priori hypothesis but instead examined five research questions. The first two explored whether the relationship between the victim and the offender, as well as the type of crime, was associated with differences in the likelihood of VIS submission. The following two explored whether the presence of a VIS was associated with differences in sentencing outcomes (incarceration, probation, ancillary orders, parole eligibility). The final research question explored whether the number of VISs and the delivery format (oral vs. written) was associated with differences in sentencing outcomes. METHOD: We coded and analyzed 1,332 sentencing rulings across Canada from 2016 to 2018 that included the phrase "impact statement." We coded for 87 variables, including information about the VIS, the victims and offenders, crime type, and sentencing outcomes. RESULTS: Overall, VISs are more likely to be delivered in cases in which the crime is more severe. Once we controlled for the type of crime, sentencing outcomes were unrelated to the presence of VISs. Sentences were longer when VISs were delivered orally than in written format and when more than one statement was submitted. CONCLUSIONS: The relationship between VISs and sentencing outcomes is closely tied to several extralegal factors and should be investigated further. This research offers insight into the mechanics of victim evidence at sentencing. The findings of this study have implications for lawyers, researchers, judges, victims, offenders, and other stakeholders in our legal systems. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".