Judicial Punishment Decisions Referring to Offences with Identical Statutory Punishments in the Light of Statistical Data

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of court punishment practice in the case of offences which have the same statutory punishment. Three groups of such offences are selected: offences punished with imprisonment from 2 to 12 years (group I), offences punished with imprisonment from 3 months to 5 years (group II) and offences punished with imprisonment from 1 month to 3 years (group III). Most of the analysed offences belonged to the group of offences against freedom (including sexual freedom) and the other chosen offences were against other socially cherished values were those quite popular in practice (therefore, the statistical data in their cases are quite representative). The analysed year was 2016. The starting hypothesis was that offences which have identical punishments in the Criminal Code (which means that the lawmaker perceives them as socially harmful in a similar way) will not be treated in such a similar way in practice and in all groups there would be offences which would be punished with visibly more severe and lighter punishments. Detailed analysis of statistical data referring to punishments imposed for the discussed offences confirmed the initial hypothesis, showing also the already known fact that courts tend to impose punishments which are closer to the minimum than to the maximum provided by the lawmaker.

Keywords

• ustawowy wymiar kary
• sędziowski wymiar kary