Elsevier

Journal of Criminal Justice

Volume 31, Issue 6, November–December 2003, Pages 523-538
Journal of Criminal Justice

The impact of race on the adjudication of sexual assault and other violent crimes

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2003.08.005Get rights and content

Abstract

This study assessed whether sexual assault offenders were differently adjudicated from other violent felons and to what extent any differences in adjudication decisions were explained by the defendant's race. Five court decisions were analyzed using a weighted sample of 41,151 cases adjudicated between 1990 and 1996 that were representative of cases in the seventy-five most populous United States counties. The results did not support the hypothesis that sexual assault cases were given, on average, more leniency than less serious violent offenses, however, various adjudication decisions for the four violent offenses were moderated by the defendant's race. Interaction models showed minorities were treated more punitively compared to Whites when they were charged with an assault, robbery, or murder, but they were treated more leniently when they were charged with a sexual assault. Explanatory models that accounted for the differential processing of minorities that were disproportionately lenient or punitive, depending on the crime, are discussed.

Introduction

Throughout history, society blamed and stigmatized women for their sexual victimization (Donat & D'Emilio, 1992). Some scholars maintain that sexism, chauvinism, and misogyny underpin the very institutions that are designed to assist sexual assault victims Brownmiller, 1975, Estrich, 1987, Stanko, 1982. During the 1960s, the women's movement called attention to the “humiliating and degrading treatment by hospital staff, police officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges” (Marsh, Geist, & Caplan, 1982, p. 1) that often resulted in victims being re-traumatized by a “second rape” from the criminal justice system (see Madigan & Gamble, 1991, Williams & Holmes, 1981). Feminist scholars and victim advocates charged that traditional rape laws were predicated on outdated myths and stereotypes of women (Marsh et al., 1982). For these reasons, a long-standing concern was that sexual assault was treated more leniently by criminal justice officials compared to other violent crimes. Various theoretical explanations for differential decision-making by criminal justice officials are considered in the next section, followed by a review of research related to the criminal justice processing of sexual assault cases.

Section snippets

Theoretical background

Consensus and conflict theories, two competing explanations for how society constructs laws and how the criminal justice system responds to crime, provide rich theoretical and often competing predictions about the behavior of social organizations and their actors. Consensus theorists assume that law is neutral and that society is stable and unified (Hunt, 1980). Definitions of criminal behavior are believed to be agreed upon by most members of society and the processing and sanctioning of

Sexual assault and leniency

A substantial proportion of research concerning sexual assault since the early 1980s focused on identifying the impact that reformed statutes3

Sexual assault, race and leniency

Due to the instrumental and ideological emphases on race throughout U.S. history, researchers often recognized criminal justice incidents and outcomes as potential hotbeds of conflict between the parties involved (e.g., victim, suspect, police officer, prosecutor, judge). While theorists argued for the importance of considering defendants' race when investigating decisions made by criminal justice officials, a consistent empirical relationship between race and sentencing outcomes has not

Limitations of prior research

Past research points to the importance of race as an explanatory variable for the differential leniency and differential punitiveness that is possible for minority defendants charged with sexual assault. The most pressing problem with extant research is the lack of comparative analyses of sexual assault versus other violent felonies, conducted on recently collected nationally represented data, using multiple adjudication and sentencing outcomes. Of the studies that compared the criminal justice

Data

The National Pretrial Reporting Program (NPRP), also known as the State Court Processing Statistics (SCPS) program served as the source of data for this study. The Program collects information on felony cases filed in May until their final disposition, or until one year has lapsed from the filing date. These felony cases were selected from a stratified sample of the nation's seventy-five most populous counties. These seventy-five counties accounted for more than one-third of the U.S. population

Bivariate analyses

Table 1 presents the bivariate results of the defendants' demographic, criminal history, and case processing outcomes by arrest charge. Sexual assault offenders are on average significantly older at the time of their arrest (x̄=thirty-two years) than any of the other violent offenders (x̄=thirty years for assault and x̄=twenty-seven years for robbery and homicide), and they are also less likely to be African-American and more likely to be White. Those arrested for sexual assault were the least

Summary and discussion

Looking across the five criminal justice case processing decisions, those arrested for sexual assault are on average treated more punitively compared to those arrested for assault or robbery, and more leniently compared to those arrested for murder. In contrast to those arrested for assault or robbery, those arrested for sexual assault are significantly: more likely to be detained after their pretrial hearing, more likely to have their arrest charge downgraded (similar to murder), less likely

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Angela Moore Parmley of the National Institute of Justice, Joel Garner of the Joint Centers for Justice Studies, and Linda Chapel Jackson of Michigan State University for their helpful comments on drafts of this article. The National Institute of Justice (98-IJ-CX-0023), the Michigan Department of Community Health, and the Joint Centers for Justice Studies supported this research. Points of view in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily

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