Citizens' Sense of Justice and the Legal System

When an actor commits a wrong action, citizens have perceptions of the kind of responsibility the actor incurs, the degree to which the act was mitigated or justified, and the appropriate punishment for the actor. The legislatively mandated law of criminal courts, statutes, and criminal codes deals with the same issues. Experimental evidence shows that there are important discrepancies between the principles that people and legal codes use to assign responsibility. That is, the moral retributive-justice principles that people use are sometimes in conflict with the directions in which modern code drafters are taking criminal law. These discrepancies may cause citizens to feel alienated from authority, and to reduce their voluntary compliance with legal codes.