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Wiley InterScience | |||||||||||||||
  CriminologyVolume 34 Issue 3, Pages 289 - 322 Published Online: 7 Mar 2006 © 2009 American Society of Criminology
Abstract | References | Full Text: PDF (Size: 1714K) | Related Articles | Citation Tracking  PUNISHING POLITICAL OFFENDERS: THE EFFECT OF POLITICAL MOTIVE ON FEDERAL SENTENCING DECISIONS* *Funding for this project was provided by a graduate faculty research grant from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The authors wish to express their appreciation to the FBI's Terrorist Research and Analytical Center and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts for assistance in data collection. We are also indebted to Charles Lindquist, Carl Klockars, Jeffrey Ross, John Sloan, Austin Turk, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Brent Smith is Professor and Chair of the Department of Justice Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His research interests include both legitimate and illegitimate social movements relating to crime and delinquency. Most recently, his research has focused upon terrorism and governmental response. He is the author of Terrorism in America: Pipe Bombs and Pipe Dreams. Kelly Damphousse is Assistant Professor in the College of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University. His current research interests include collective behavior (domestic terrorism and the "satanic panic"), the consequences of adolescent drug use, and prison crime. Copyright 1996 by the American Society of Criminology ABSTRACTAlthough political motive is frequently avoided as an issue in the prosecution of terrorists, previous research indicates that these offenders consistently receive longer sentences than nonterrorists convicted of similar offenses (Smith, 1994). This study assesses the ability of three theoretical models (consensus, conflict, and structural-contextual) to explain these differences in sentencing patterns. Data on terrorists (N = 95), provided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, and the U.S. Sentencing Commission, is matched with data on a sample of similarly convicted nonterrorists from the Federal Court Cases Integrated Data Base, 1970-1991 (N = 403). Controlling for a number of demographic and sentencing-related variables, the results indicate that the official label of "terrorist" is not only a significant predictor of sentence length, but emerges as the dominant explanatory variable in the analysis. The results provide general support for both consensus and conflict hypotheses, but only partial support for structural-contextual theory. The findings also raise procedural questions regarding the extensive variation in sentencing between similarly situated defendants when political motive is used as a primary criterion for sentence enhancements. | 
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