Timing is everything: The role of contextual and terrorism-specific factors in the sentencing outcomes of terrorist offenders

Amirault, Joanna; Bouchard, Martin

doi:10.1177/1477370815578194

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…For example, when assessing the dangerousness of individuals (both pre‐ and postinvolvement in terrorism), the role that they held (or hold) may provide important insight into the nature of their commitment and their proximity to the execution of terrorist attacks. However, it is important to state that this will still pose problems as some individuals may progress through different roles (becoming more, or less “dangerous” over time), while others may stay in the same role throughout the entirety of their involvement ; and for a recent exploration of other factors affecting terrorist sentencing, see .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Actions Speak Louder than Words: A Behavioral Analysis of 183 Individuals Convicted for Terrorist Offenses in the United States from 1995 to 2012

Horgan

Shortland

Abbasciano

et al. 2016

Journal of Forensic Sciences

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Involvement in terrorism has traditionally been discussed in relatively simplistic ways with little effort spent on developing a deeper understanding of what involvement actually entails, and how it differs from person to person. In this paper, we present the results of a three-year project focused on 183 individuals associated with the global jihadist movement who were convicted in the United States, for terrorist offenses, between 1995 and 2012. These data were developed by a large-scale, open-source data collection activity that involved a coding dictionary of more than 120 variables. We identify and explore the diversity of behaviors that constitute involvement in terrorism. We also compare lone actors and those who acted as part of a group, finding that lone actors differed from group-based actors in key demographic attributes and were more likely to be involved in attack execution behaviors. Implications for counterterrorism are then discussed.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Actions Speak Louder than Words: A Behavioral Analysis of 183 Individuals Convicted for Terrorist Offenses in the United States from 1995 to 2012

Horgan

Shortland

Abbasciano

et al. 2016

Journal of Forensic Sciences

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“…The applicability of themes can be expanded to studies of European justice models, building on Amirault and Bouchard's (2017) study of terrorism sentencing trends in the United Kingdom, or Argomaniz et al's (2015) analysis of counter-terrorism approaches in the European Union. The existential questions of liberty and security raised by this field are not constrained to the United States, and this discussion can provide a baseline from which other nation-states dealing with domestic terrorism can seek to evaluate the efficacy of their government's response.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decoding the U.S. justice system’s response to typologies of domestic terrorism

Sinnott

2023

CVIR

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This study adjudicates disparities in the United States government's response to different terrorism typologies under a domestic legal framework. Far Right and Islamic Extremist typologies were compared and informed by Structural-Contextual theory. The study leveraged data from the American Terrorism Study to evaluate empirically prosecutorial approaches, plea and trial conviction rates, the magnitude of investigatory resources applied, and levels of explained variance between groups. Total conviction rates were largely different among groups, with significantly harsher outcomes for Islamic Extremists. The author proposes a variation of Structural-Contextual theory, where a proactive political environment is predictive of more severe outcomes.

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“…However, there was no indication as to how severity of punishment impacted terrorism offending rates overall. It is also important to note that despite perceptions that terrorism cases are associated with stiff sentencing, there is actually evidence of relatively short sentences being associated with terrorism offending (Amirault et al, 2016;Harms, 2017;. However, as stated, it is not known how variation in punishment severity impacts terrorism.…”

Section: Deterrence Of Terrorismmentioning

confidence: 97%

Arrests and convictions but not sentence length deter terrorism in 28 European Union member states

Wolfowicz,

Campedelli,

Seaward

et al. 2023

Nat Hum Behav

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While countries differ signi cantly in how they handle terrorism, in the west, criminal justice systems tend to treat terrorism similar to other crime, with police, prosecutors, judges and courts, and penal systems carrying out similar functions of investigations, apprehension, charging, convicting, and overseeing punishments respectively. While there is a robust literature on deterrent effects for crime, there is a dearth of research when it comes to terrorism. This despite evidence of signi cant overlaps between crime and terrorism. We address this gap in the literature with a unique dataset covering terrorism offending, arrests, charges, convictions, and sentencing over 16 years in 28 EU-member states. Applying a dynamic panel data model, we nd that the probability of apprehension and punishment has an inverse relationship with terrorism offending. Conversely, the rate of charged individuals is associated with a small increase in the terrorism offending rate. The results for sentence length are less clear, with either negligible, or small iatrogenic effects. The results demonstrate that the overlap between crime and terrorism may extend to general deterrence. These ndings should be informative for both the research agenda and policy discussion. into behaviors when certain risk factors and situational and contextual factors are present. In general, the moral evaluations that terrorists have of their behaviors are not so different from those which criminals have toward their behaviors (Baez et al., 2017). In this respect, one of the most striking recent ndings is that general risk and protective factors for terrorism, and its cognitive antecedents, are virtually identical to risk and protective factors for violent crime and its cognitive antecedents. The (relative) magnitude of the effects are also markedly similar (Wolfowicz et al., 2021).These ndings add another layer to the growing evidence that shows that terrorism follows similar patterns as crime across a range of outcomes, including recidivism (Hasisi et al., 2020a), cycles of violence (Behlendorf, LaFree and Legault, 2012), target selection (Marchment & Gill, 2022), as well as network organization and attack timing (Johnson et al., 2013). Importantly, policing strategies found to be most effective in combatting crime are also those that appear most effective in combatting terrorism . Moreover, terrorism follows laws of crime concentration, distance decay functions (e.g., Hasisi et al., 2020b), and other patterns congruent with routine activities and crime pattern theory (e.g.,

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Timing is everything: The role of contextual and terrorism-specific factors in the sentencing outcomes of terrorist offenders

Cited by 7 publications

References 44 publications

Actions Speak Louder than Words: A Behavioral Analysis of 183 Individuals Convicted for Terrorist Offenses in the United States from 1995 to 2012

Actions Speak Louder than Words: A Behavioral Analysis of 183 Individuals Convicted for Terrorist Offenses in the United States from 1995 to 2012

Decoding the U.S. justice system’s response to typologies of domestic terrorism

Arrests and convictions but not sentence length deter terrorism in 28 European Union member states

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