Criminal Justice Outcomes in Intimate and Non-intimate Partner Homicide Cases

4. Results (cont'd)

4.2 Multivariate analysis: Isolating the effects of intimacy in criminal law (continued)

In summary, after examining the effect of the victim-accused relationship on each of the criminal justice outcomes, it appears that the earlier stages of the criminal process are more important in understanding the role played by intimacy in criminal law, but not necessarily in the direction expected. The four key findings are as follows:

First-degree murder charge

At the initial charging stage, accused persons who killed intimate partners were significantly less likely to be charged with first-degree murder than those who killed non-intimate partners. In other words, because the majority of accused are initially charged with murder as already noted, those who killed intimate partners were more likely to be charged with second degree rather than first-degree murder.

Case sent to trial

Cases that involved intimate partners were significantly less likely to be resolved at trial than cases involving non-intimate partners. Therefore, accused persons who killed intimate partners were more likely to plead guilty than those who killed non-intimate partners.

Found guilty at trial

Of those cases resolved at trial, those accused of killing intimate partners were more likely to be found guilty at this stage than those accused of killing non-intimate partners.

Overall conviction

Accused persons who killed intimate partners were significantly more likely to be convicted overall than accused persons who killed victims with whom they shared more distant relationships. This finding is likely due, in large part, to the greater likelihood that they are also more likely to plead guilty.

Given that there were no differences in the treatment of these two types of accused persons at the sentencing stage, these results provide support for the argument that in order to understand criminal case processing, researchers need to look at more than a single stage or decision-making point. In fact, if this analysis had focused exclusively on sentencing, important differences in the treatment of the accused at these earlier stages in the process would have been obscured. The next section briefly examines the independent effects of time on criminal justice outcomes before looking at the role of intimacy over time in criminal law.