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There has been controversy surrounding high-profile Canadian court cases due to stakeholders asserting that justice was not delivered in the offenders’ sentencing. Cases such as R v. Bernardo (including R. v. Homolka), R v. Pickton and R v. Li have drawn criticism from stakeholders, such as the victims’ families and the public, for perceived lax and disproportionate sentencing. I aim to make sense of and determine why this is their perception of these cases and offer a way to understand these cases’ judicial decisions. Reading these cases through the lens of philosophical punishment theories will (1) determine the underlying compatible legal theory guiding these sentences that are perceived as lax and disproportionate, (2) explain the reasoning behind these sentences, and (3) help us understand why the public and the victims’ families perceive these sentences as lax and disproportionate. In this thesis, I will argue that Canada’s criminal justice system could be understood as incorporating various punishment theories for criminal offender sentencing, such as strict retribution, utilitarianism, and paternalism as a form of rehabilitation. I will focus my research on three punishment theories that I believe have been significant in guiding the law’s application in the Canadian legal system and the modern history of Western law: Immanuel Kant’s strict retributive punishment theory, Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian punishment theory, and Herbert Morris’ paternalistic punishment theory. I will argue that by identifying the underlying punishment theories, we can identify where the judicial decision is perceived as flawed by the public and the victims’ families and how to understand the effect of these theories in future judicial decisions. Based on my findings, I will sketch an alternative Kantian punishment theory that can be a theoretical lens through which we can evaluate proportionality in sentencing by providing a victim-centred approach to punishment. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / There has been controversy surrounding high-profile Canadian court cases due to the victims’ families and the public perceiving the offenders’ sentencing as lax and disproportionate to their crimes’ severity. I aim to make sense of and determine why this is their perception of these cases and offer a way to understand these cases’ judicial decisions. Reading these cases through the lens of philosophical punishment theories will (1) determine the underlying compatible legal theory guiding these sentences that are perceived as lax and disproportionate, (2) explain the reasoning behind these sentences, and (3) help us understand why the public and the victims’ families perceive these sentences as lax and disproportionate. Based on my findings, I will sketch an alternative Kantian punishment theory that can be a theoretical lens through which we can evaluate proportionality in sentencing by providing a victim-centred approach to punishment.

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Sentencing in the Czech Republic: An Empirical Investigation Abstract Sentencing is in many respects still terra incognita. This holds true especially for other countries than common law ones and those in the Western and Northern Europe. This dissertation thus empirically studies sentencing practices in the Czech Republic using quantitative methods. It is composed of four articles focusing on various sentencing issues: Firstly, on the influence of judicial experience on sentencing using longitudinal data analyzing judges' trajectories from 2008 onward. It shows that increasing experience reduces inter-judge disparity. Secondly, on analyzing previously underappreciated measure to achieve policy change: Informal authority of the supreme institutions. In 2016 the Prosecutor General's Office and the Supreme Court organized several meetings and seminars for prosecutors and judges in order to persuade them to impose more fines. This paper illustrates that these informal tools might have been underappreciated as they are highly effective. The third paper is dedicated to studying a particular extra-legal characteristics influencing sentencing in Prague: The weather. It builds both on psychological literature showing that weather influences mood and mood often impacts behavior and decision-making and on previous US...

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State prison systems, particularly in the Southern US, have been overpopulated for decades with unlikely support for building new prisons which has led to overcrowding. Policy makers, however, have adopted mandatory minimum policies that include harsher sanctions for habitual offenders which exacerbated the problem of overcrowding, yet little is understood about how sentencing reform is associated with overpopulation. Using Clear and Schrantz conceptualization of prison population change, the purpose of this quantitative descriptive study was to understand how one prison system in a southern state was impacted over a 10-year period by the implementation of mandatory minimum sentencing requirements. Data were collected from publicly available resources from a state department of corrections and state law enforcement agencies related to crime rates, sentence terms, parole rates, and prison population for the years 1993 through 2013. These data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, including measures of central tendency and visual examination of line plots. Findings indicated that the state'€™s prison population did not change following the 2003 enactment of mandatory-minimum sentencing. Though no changes in prison population trends were observed, further testing may be considered to better understand the relationship between sentencing reform efforts and strengthened provisions to the laws regarding habitual felony offenders. The implications for positive social change stemming from this study includes recommendations to lawmakers to expand research and use the results as the basis of future decisions to either revise or eliminate mandatory sentencing policies taking into consideration crowding in state prisons.

When children face separation from their parents as a consequence of state action in the family courts, their best interests are the paramount consideration of the court and they have legal representation. Children who face separation from their mother as a consequence of sentencing proceedings in the criminal courts are neither represented nor acknowledged. The thesis analyses this differentiated treatment and explores its consequences for children, society and the state. Explanations for the differentiated treatment are tested with reference to existing literature and original empirical research. The impact on children of imprisoned mothers is investigated to determine whether or not they suffer harm. The parameters of the state duty of care towards children are explored, to see if children of defendant mothers fall outside of it, and the way sentencing judges construct and interpret their duty towards mothers and their children within the sentencing process is examined. This thesis establishes that without legal or moral justification, children of maternal defendants are treated without the concern given to children who face separation from their parents in the family courts. Children of defendant mothers suffer as a consequence of the 'secondary prisonisation', 'secondary stigmatisation' and 'confounding grief' which they experience, and the state has failed to uphold their rights under Articles 3, 12 and 20, and is in breach of its duty under Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989. The guidance and mechanisms for considering their welfare exist but are not engaged with by the sentencing courts, local authorities, legislators or policy makers. This has negative consequences for children, their caregivers and wider society. The thesis concludes with consideration of the implications of these findings for the state and suggests changes to ensure equitable treatment of children of defendant mothers in England and Wales.

Cette recherche s’inscrit dans le domaine du sentencing. Sa question de départ porte sur la persistance, dans les jugements correctionnels, du modèle rétributif et des peines privatives de liberté, sur le manque d’essor des peines alternatives à l’emprisonnement et sur l’allongement des peines. La littérature portant sur le sentencing souligne l’importance, dans la décision de la peine, du pouvoir discrétionnaire du juge, qui fait partie intégrante du processus d’interprétation de la loi pénale. La décision est un processus humain (Hogarth), une pratique sociale complexe dans un environnement structuré et structurant (Beyens), le produit de collaborations et de contraintes institutionnelles (Gibson). Adoptant la perspective de la construction de la peine comme processus humain et interactionnel en contexte, la question empirique est : « Comment le juge pénal décide-t-il de la peine dans son contexte d’action ? ». Son cadre conceptuel est l’ethnométhodologie. Dans ce courant, la sociologie cognitive examine la chaîne processuelle du traitement de l’information, c’est-à-dire comment les membres d’un groupe social donnent une signification à une situation en sélectionnant et interprétant les informations, puis la catégorisent et décident, par induction, de la norme à appliquer et de la conduite à tenir. Pour répondre à la question empirique, le dispositif méthodologique comprend des observations durant huit mois en tant que stagiaire dans deux tribunaux ; des échanges informels avec les différents acteurs judiciaires et para-judiciaires ; et des entretiens formalisés avec les juges. Quatre procédures principales se dégagent du matériau empirique : évaluer le dossier répressif ; évaluer la personne du prévenu ; évaluer la réprobation adéquate ; évaluer une peine acceptable. Ces procédures permettent de mettre en lumière les savoirs, raisons, motivations, valeurs et mécanismes qui entrent dans le processus décisionnel de la peine. Cette analyse permet de construire progressivement un modèle de la prise de décision en contexte et, partant, de répondre aux questionnements de départ.