Models of decision-making on guilt and sanctions

Decision making in criminal law has attracted much attention from social scientists. For instance, hundreds of studies on sentencing deal with the influence of different case characteristics (e.g. the defendant's criminal career, the defendant's as well as the victim's sex, race, age or physical attractiveness and the gravity
of the offence), characteristics of the deciding jurors and judges (e.g. sex, race and political ideologies) as well as the interaction between features of the cases and attributes of the particular decision maker (see e.g. Devine et al., 20or; Pennington & Lloyd-Bostock, 1987). However, most of the empirical work is based on only a few distinct basic models describing the fundamental psychological processes invoked to perform the decision task itself. Within this chapter, we will describe the most prominent of these approaches. But before doing so, we want to briefly discuss the different decision tasks in criminal law as well as the question of who makes which decision.