"Judicial Disparity, Deviation, and Departures from Sentencing Guidelines: The Case of Hong Kong"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new article appearing in the latest issue of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies authored by Kevin Kwok-yin Cheng, Sayaka Ri, and Natasha Pushkarna.  Here is its abstract:

Analyzing sentencing disparity calls for more calibrated measures to capture the nuances of judicial discretion within jurisdictions that adopt strict sentencing guidelines.  This article uses an unconventional outcome variable, percent deviation, to investigate guideline digressions in a nested, multilevel model.  Percent deviation is calculated based on the difference between the guidelines’ “arithmetic starting point” and the actual starting point that a judge adopts.  Two equations were used to measure percent deviation from the arithmetic starting point before and after adjustment for guilty plea sentence reductions.

Extracting data on drug trafficking cases from an open‐source database from the Hong Kong Judiciary (n = 356), we illustrate how percent deviation can be employed as a measure of inter‐judge disparity using hierarchical linear models (HLMs).  Our findings suggest that approximately 8 to 10 percent of the deviation in sentence length can be attributed to judges’ differential sentencing behaviors.  The deviation is affected by case characteristics as well as judicial characteristics.  Due to the wide guideline ranges, departures from said guidelines’ ranges are not common.  This indicates that the guideline ranges mask the deviation and inter‐judge disparity that exist and recur.