Abstract
Like saiban-in system in Japan, mixed jury system very often requires citizen participants to decide the sentencing. On deciding the sentencing, one of the important issues after the defendant being judged guilty is whether the punishment should be suspended. It is said that civic participants would be more inclined to make decisions to suspend the punishments or put the defendant on probation than professional judges, due to the effects of emotions and other subjective factors. But there have been rarely studied effects of emotional or other subjective factors on suspending decisions. This study explores those effects with a questionnaire experiment which is participated by university students. Through analyses of the participants’ judgments on a fictitious criminal case, the author investigated the effects of emotional and empathic factors on the judgments of suspension of the accused. At the same time, the author looked into the relationships between the judgments and attitudes toward crime and law and relationships between judgments and empathic personality traits.
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Acknowledgments
This study is a part of the results of Foreign Residency Research Program as an academic research of Kansai University in the academic year 2013. Major parts of the analysis were done during the residency period, when the author has been a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society of the University of California, Berkeley. This paper is to be presented at the 50th annual conference of the Law and Society Association at the Hilton Minneapolis, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, from May 27 to June 1, 2014. Round-trip travel expenses between Berkeley and Minneapolis were disbursed by the accompanied grant of the Foreign Residency Research Program of Kansai University.
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Fujita, M. (2018). To Be Suspended or Not to Be?: The Effects of Emotions and Personality Variables on Lay People’s Judgment of Suspension of Punishment. In: Liu, J., Miyazawa, S. (eds) Crime and Justice in Contemporary Japan. Springer Series on Asian Criminology and Criminal Justice Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69359-0_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69359-0_16
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