스토킹 피고인의 구속 여부와 구속사유로서의 재범위험성이 배심원의 양형 판단에 미치는 영향

초록

Recent incidents in which stalking cases have escalated into serious violent crimes have raised social concerns, leading to calls for more proactive pretrial detention and for expanding detention grounds to include recidivism risk. This study experimentally examined how such shifts in criminal justice responses influence jurors’ legal decision-making. A total of 158 mock jurors participated in a 2 (detention status: detained vs. not detained) × 2 (inclusion of recidivism risk as a detention ground: included vs. not included) between-subjects experiment. The results showed that defendants who were detained received significantly longer prison sentences than those who were not detained, whereas no interaction effect was found between detention status and the inclusion of recidivism risk as a detention ground. In addition, detention increased jurors’ confidence in their guilt judgments, and the indirect effect through the perceived probability that the defendant was guilty was significant. Furthermore, perceived recidivism risk was identified as a significant mediator of the relationship between detention status and sentence length. These findings suggest that detention may function as a cue that promotes harsher punishment toward defendants. Based on these results, the study discusses the implications of recent changes in criminal justice responses, as well as the limitations of the study and directions for future research.

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