Uncovering Swedish Sentencing Decisions with regards to Multiple-Offence Cases

• In Event: Poster Session

Abstract

This study concerns sentencing decisions in cases in which an offender has been convicted for multiple separate offences and faces being sentenced for them in a single proceeding. Three principles regulate multiple-offence sentencing, namely concurrency, consecutiveness, and partial concurrency/partial consecutiveness. This third combined principle, in various forms, is most widely used in sentencing practice in the majority of Western style jurisdictions. In effect, this principle offers a discount provided to a total sentence for a case composed of separately calculated sentences for the comprising individual offences. The first question that arises is how such discount operates in practice. The question that follows is how the discount can be justified conceptually, especially in light of the principle of proportionality. Data for this study comes from the Swedish jurisdiction. 12 practicing judges were presented with 19 hypothetical cases each and asked to make sentencing decisions on them while commenting upon their underlying thinking and decision processes. Results emerging from the sentencing exercise, namely a number of approaches, explicit and implicit factors that influence sentencing decisions as well as judges’ reasoning and patterns they tend to follow when considering multiple offences, are presented.

Author

• Natalia Vibla, University of Cambridge