About The Depravity Standard
What is The Depravity Standard?
- The Depravity Standard enables courts to identify offenses that are worse than others, and why. What murders, objectively, deserve the most severe punishment? Based on what qualities? What assaults are severe enough that an offender should be housed in a different country’s prison system? What robbery offenders are most deserving of leniency in early release considerations? The Depravity Standard is an evidence-driven metric designed to inform whether a crime is more severe relative to others of its class – or is not. Evidence informing The Depravity Standard scoring draws from the perpetrator’s intent, victim choice, actions during the crime, and attitude about the crime. This granular focus informs charging, sentencing, and release decisions without bias of race, socioeconomics, or national origin.
- The Depravity Standard is researched and designed to give voice to the attitudes of potential jurors. Developed from careful study of real-world convicted cases and crowd sourced survey of individual citizens, The Depravity Standard is the first forensic science or justice project in which the broader public directly and collectively shapes criminal sentencing.
- Data from the input you give in this research platform of The Depravity Standard converges with data mined from hundreds of convicted cases to establish statistical thresholds for low, medium, and high depravity crimes. Easy for judges, jurors, and other justice officials to apply, The Depravity Standard can inform various issues that are affected by the severity of the crime.
Why is The Depravity Standard necessary?
- Criminal law statutes allow for “aggravating factors” that worsen sentencing once a defendant is found guilty. One such factor is whether a crime is “depraved,” or “heinous.” A defendant found guilty of an especially heinous crime may have years added to one’s sentence or may even be given the death penalty. Until The Depravity Standard was researched and developed, however, there was no available consistent or clear method to evaluate the depravity or depravity of a given crime.
- When judges, juries, and government officials have little direction as to what makes a crime depraved, such judgments are overly driven by emotion-driven and subjective argument. Proceedings not informed by evidence contribute to decisions that reflect privilege and bias more than justice.
- Who gets sent to another country’s prisons? Who gets an early release? Are those decisions determined in a fair manner? Arbitrary decisions of why one person receives early release and another gets no leniency undermine confidence in the justice system. The Depravity Standard also assists corrections professionals and government officials charged with classifying crimes by severity to inform early release decisions. Evidence-based decisions limit bias, promote fairness and confidence in the integrity of the justice system.
A careful methodology to achieve
reliability & validity
- The United States Supreme Court has noted the need for guidance on societal standards of what is a heinous crime, in order to assist juries in areas of their inexperience. The Depravity Standard accomplishes exactly that mission.
- The Depravity Standard, grounded in higher-court decisions, informed by your opinions in the research you participate in here, and validated with actual large-scale case data, is ever-refining an evidence-focused tool to assist judges, juries, and government decision-makers. The Depravity Standard measures specific intent, actions, victim choice, and attitudes about criminal activity. These features are the “what” of a crime, as opposed to the “who” or the “why.” A methodology that relies on clear standards of evidence-driven criteria as opposed to subjective arbitrary opinions provides reliable and valid assessment of what is depraved and what is not.
- To read more about the research methodology for establishing the reliability and validity of The Depravity Standard, click here.
