Defendants' Age and Severity of Punishment for Two Crimes in a Mock Scenario: Further Data

Abstract

95 undergraduates read a simulated crime vignette about either murder or theft in which the perpetrator was a 20-, 40-, or 60-yr.-old man, then gave recommendations about sentence and parole. Subsequently, they made a second set of recommendations for the other crime and another age. For combined sets of judgments, punishment was harsher for the murder than for the theft. For murder, the 60-yr.-old and the 20-yr.-old were both treated more leniently than the 40-yr.-old, but the difference was greater for the older than for the younger offender. Researchers should examine age in relation to judgments for different crimes with participants exposed to all experimental conditions.

Effects of Offenders' Age and Health on Sentencing Decisions

“…Furthermore, consistent with the earlier study, the 20 and 60 year-old offenders were treated more leniently than the 40 year-old offender. The leniency effect was most pronounced for the 60 year-old offender (see McKelvie & Bergeron [2003] for additional analyses of the Bergeron & McKelvie [2004] data). However, in two other experimental studies of sentencing for violent assault (Higgins, Heath, & Grannemann, 2007;Loeffler & Lawson, 2002), no leniency effect was found for the older offender (i.e.…”