Gender and sentencing in capital cases: Chinese criminal justice professionals’ perspectives

The operation of a fair criminal justice system hinges upon its criminal justice professionals (CJPs) making decisions based on considerations of legal but not extra-legal factors. Studies have shown that offenders’ gender, an extra-legal factor, may impact criminal justice decisions. Both the paternalism/chivalry and evil women hypotheses are proposed and tested accordingly. In comparison, fewer studies explored the impact of CJPs’ gender on their decision-making. Based on survey data of 516 CJPs from one Chinese city, this study explores potential impact of both CJPs’ and offenders’ gender on CJPs’ preferred punishment in five hypothetical capital cases. The results suggest that female offenders are more likely to receive more lenient dispositions for homicide and sexual assault of minors (supporting the paternalism/chivalry hypothesis), but harsher punishment for drug trafficking (supporting the evil women hypothesis). In contrast, no significant impact of CJPs’ gender was found in multivariate analyses, albeit bivariate results indicated some leniency from female CJPs. This study suggests that offenders’ gender may still exert influence, with the magnitude and direction of the effect varying by specific crime type and crime circumstances, while the effect of CJPs’ gender is largely negated by organizational arrangements and constraints in the unique context of China.