METHOD
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Participants
The
total number of participants in the ‘Case Conviction’ dependent variable
comparisons was 716. The total number of people who had a public defender was
428, whereas those who had a private attorney to defend them totaled 288. There
were four categories to the independent variable ‘Crime Type’. Those who were
charged with Assault came to 355 total defendants. Only 52 defendants were
charged with Burglary and 154 defendants were charged with Homicide. A total of
155 defendants were charged with Robbery. ‘Biological Evidence’ was the last
independent variable; 606 defendant cases didn’t collect any biological
evidence at the crime scenes, while only 110 defendants’ cases had biological
evidence collected at the scene.
Materials & Location
The
original material used for this study was the data set borrowed from the
ICPSR’s website titled, Impact of
Forensic Evidence on the Criminal Justice Process in Five Sites in the United
States, 2003-2006, also sponsored by the National Institute of Justice.
Joseph Peterson and Ira Summers of California State University – Los Angeles,
conducted this study in 2010. This original material was analyzed on SPSS
Statistics software, manufactured by IBM. Original information was gathered by
administrative records data in five city jurisdictions, including Los Angeles
County, California; Indianapolis, Indiana; Evansville, Indiana; Fort Wayne,
Indiana; and South Bend, Indiana. The data collected was randomly sampled from
the populations from the towns above between 2003 and 2006, then stratified by
crime type and jurisdiction from police incident and investigation reports,
crime lab reports, and prosecutor case files.
The Relationships Between Variables in Criminal
Case Outcomes looks at what in the data collected between the
variables defender type, crime type, and if there was biological evidence
collected at the crime scene, relate to the outcome of each case, either ending
in a conviction or not, or if any specific combination provided evidence for
longer sentence lengths.
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