Summary

At the beginning of 2009, the Ministry of Justice and the Supreme Court published an analysis of the practice of the courts in imposing punishments for the most common offences. The analysis was based on court judgments delivered in 2007 that are available in the database of court decisions. The primary purpose of the analysis was to identify whether and for what reasons there are differences in the punishments imposed by different county courts for similar offences, and also to provide a general overview of the punishments imposed by the courts. The researchers originally intended to also compare the punishments imposed in general proceedings and various simplified proceedings, but they discovered in the course of their research that the number of judgments made in general proceedings was insufficient for a full comparison.

According to the State Register of Criminal Matters, the most common offences were theft (Section 199 of the Penal Code (KarS), physical abuse (Section 121 KarS), aggravated breach of public order (Section 263 KarS) and driving while intoxicated (Section 424 KarS). The analysis focused on offences with regard to which a sufficiently large number of judgments had been made.

In addition to the analysis, the research included an online survey of judges and prosecutors. The survey included questions to determine whether socio-demographic factors affect the punishments imposed, and whether and to what extent the punishments sought by prosecutors differ from those imposed by the courts.

As the analysis is available to the public on the internet, the focus of this article is not on the analysis itself, rather on the legal issues that it identified.