Research Monograph 8 — Alcohol as a sentencing factor

Alcohol as a sentencing factor

In June 1993 the Australian Institute of Criminology approached the Judicial Commission of New South Wales with a view to conducting an examination of the attitude of judicial officers to the sentencing of persons who were intoxicated at the time of the offence. This project was to be part of a much wider enquiry into the legal approaches to alcohol related violence, a project commissioned by the Commonwealth Department of Health, Housing, Local Government and Community Services (now Human Services and Health). 

It was decided that the most appropriate means of examining judicial attitudes towards these issues was to design and conduct a survey of judicial officers. This monograph therefore contains a summary of the findings of that survey. 

It was not intended to look ·at the level of the sentence that judicial officers would have imposed in particular cases, but rather to examine the approach that sentencers take on issues about alcohol as a sentencing factor. For this reason, judicial officers were not asked to indicate what sort of sentence they would impose in a particular case. Rather, through a series of hypothetical cases, they were asked to assess what weight they would give to the alcohol factor (amongst other traditional sentencing factors). Of particular interest was their response as to whether, in light of the facts described in each case, alcohol was to be regarded as a mitigating, aggravating or neutral consideration in their decision-making.

Paperback, 76 pp, June 1994, ISBN 0 7310 3684 0