Citation

Jeong CW. J. Korean Public Police Security Stud. 2017; 14(2): 149-172.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Korean Association for Public Security Administration)

DOI

10.25023/kapsa.14.2.201708.149

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In South Korea, Judges have the large discretionary power in practice in deciding suspended sentence even though general criteria for such sentence is established by the criminal law and the commission of sentencing in supreme court. In result, there is intensive debates on objectivity and pertinence of current criteria for suspended sentence in academic. Therefore, the objective criteria is needed to minimize judges' arbitrary judging when they decide suspended sentence. The purpose of this study is to suggest via empirical analysis the objective criteria for suspended sentence of judges through calculating the weights to the factors of suspended sentence. The type of crimes which is the subject for this analysis is crimes related to traffic. To achieve the purpose of this study, we collected the 28 written judgements about the suspended sentence of crimes related to traffic for 5 years from 2011 to 2015. And we used a data, obtained by survey of 13 legal professionals, on the weight of factors which exert influence on suspended sentence. And we weighted the factors of suspended sentence and applied them to the 28 sentencings. In regard to methods of study, we used the text mining to analyse the reasons of these sentencings and the AHP(analytic Hierachy Process) to analyse the survey data of professional group. The result of this study showed that suspended sentence of judges is not decided by factors which legal professional consider them important, but decided by factors which is not considered important. The results of this study is not perfect. Nevertheless, we hope that this study made a valuable contributions in that suggesting some objective and quantitative criteria for suspended sentence of courts.

Language: ko

Keywords

Analytic Hierachy Process; Crimes related to traffic; Criteria for suspended sentence; Text-mining; Weight.