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Rethinking the Boundaries of Intimacy at the End of the Century: The Role of Victim-Defendant Relationship in Criminal Justice Decisionmaking Over Time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Myrna Dawson
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Abstract

I investigate whether the degree of intimacy between victims and defendants affects legal responses to violence and how this association has changed over time. Using data on homicides between 1974 and 1996, I examine court outcomes in more than 1,000 cases. I demonstrate that intimacy matters at three criminal justice stages: charging, mode of conviction, and sentencing. However, moving beyond the traditional conceptualization of intimacy, I show that defendants who kill intimates do not always receive the same treatment, nor are all defendants who kill nonintimates treated similarly. Finally, I show that criminal justice leniency toward intimate violence is less evident in recent years.

Type
Articles Of General Interest
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , January 2004 , pp. 105 - 138
Copyright
© 2004 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2002 Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association meetings in Toronto, Ontario. Special thanks to Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy for making some of the data used in this analysis available to the author. Thanks also to Jennifer Butters and Rosemary Gartner for providing feedback on earlier versions. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the insightful comments of the anonymous reviewers and the editor of Law & Society Review.

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