Sentencing research shows judges not out of touch with community views

10/02/2011

It's the man-bites-dog story of legal affairs. The Australian Institute of Criminology has published a groundbreaking study - Public Judgement on Sentencing: Final results from the Tasmanian Jury Sentencing Study. It shows what members of the legal profession have known implicitly all along: that the more informed the public is about judicial decisions, the more likely they are to agree with criminal sentences. At the launch of the report, Minister for Justice Brendan O'Connor said:� “This study reveals that a majority of jurors gave a more lenient sentence than the one imposed by the trial judge and after reading the sentencing reasons 90 per cent of jurors found the sentence delivered in their trial to be appropriate”. View the minister's media release FOLLOWED BY the report >

**10 February 2011 **