Sentencing disparities in the Czech Republic: Empirical evidence from post-communist Europe

Abstract

Although there is an extensive literature on sentencing disparities in common law countries, there have been only a few empirical studies in continental countries and virtually none in post-communist ones. This article presents findings from the Czech Republic, which show that there are important disparities in post-communist Europe, comparable to those in the USA before the introduction of sentencing guidelines. I employ a multi-level modelling approach to study the sentencing practices in Czech district courts for the three most common offences. The values of intra-cluster correlation are found to be between .066 and .178 for the various models, which is considered high. The specifics of civil law post-communist countries are further discussed in relation to choosing appropriate ways of reducing disparities.