Date of Award

1-1-2023

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

School of Criminal Justice

Content Description

1 online resource (vii, 154 pages)

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Alissa P Worden

Committee Members

James Acker, Robert E Worden, Kirstin Morgan

Keywords

justice court, non-attorney judge, rural justice, Lay judges, Judges, Courts

Subject Categories

Criminology

Abstract

With about 13.2 million misdemeanor cases processed through the criminal justice system each year, an increasing number of researchers has shifted their interests from felony courts to lower criminal courts (Smith & Maddan, 2019). One aspect of these lower criminal courts that is of particular interest is the eligibility of non-lawyers to run for and hold judgeships. Although New York and 18 other states have permitted the employment of lay judges, court reformers have long questioned their ability to safeguard defendant’s due process rights. However, at no point in the history of agitation against lay judges have their critics sought to differentiate carefully between educational background and other characteristics of these justice courts, such as limited facilities and personnel. Recognizing this gap in prior literature, this dissertation provides the first quantitative examination on pretrial release decisions and sentencing outcomes by judge type (lay vs law-trained) and court type (town/village courts vs city/county courts) in one upstate New York county – the Hudson County. Findings from logistic and multinomial logistic regression analyses showed no statistically significant differences on both outcome variables. Additional analyses also showed that most extra-legal and legal factors had similar impact on pretrial release decisions and sentencing outcomes for both judge types and court types.

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