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Sentencing practice and specific deterrence: Unveiling relevant factors in decision-making behaviour in Austrian criminal proceedings

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  • Nina Kaiser,
  • Ida Leibetseder
Nina Kaiser
Hans Gross Center for Interdisciplinary Criminal Sciences, Department of Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure Law and Criminology, University of Graz
Bio
Ida Leibetseder
Hans Gross Center for Interdisciplinary Criminal Sciences, Department of Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure Law and Criminology, University of Graz
Bio

Published 2026-04-13

Keywords

  • sentencing,
  • specific deterrence,
  • deterrence,
  • decision-making behavior,
  • interdisciplinarity

Copyright (c) 2026 Nina Kaiser, Ida Leibetseder

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

“Sentencing practice and specific deterrence: Unveiling relevant factors in decision-making behaviour in Austrian criminal proceedings: Praktyka orzekania kary a prewencja indywidualna: analiza czynników wpływających na proces decyzyjny w austriackim postępowaniu karnym” (2026) Archives of Criminology, p. 23 pp. doi:10.7420/AK2025.14.
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Abstract

According to Austrian criminal law, court decisions must be made in a way that serves specific deterrence. This principle emphasizes that judges must weigh a variety of factors in order to impose a sentence that supports the offender’s rehabilitation and the prevention of future offences. Although some norms offer insight into the range of information to be considered, the underlying concepts remain vague, leaving significant room for discretion. Additionally, judges are not obliged to provide comprehensive reasons for their considerations in their final judgment. These aspects not only lead to the lack of detailed justifications for sentencing decisions in individual cases but also result in hardly any appellate decisions that address the relevance of individual factors. Furthermore, there are no relevant studies in this area, resulting in a lack of detailed information on the factors considered in the decision-making process, leaving the following research question unresolved: What factors play what role in the reasoning-behavior within the Austrian sentencing practice?
The study “Intuition in criminal proceedings? – On the interdisciplinarity of factors in specific deterrence decision-making practice,” funded by the Province of Styria (Austria), has set itself the goal of quantitatively surveying the reasoning behavior of judges and public prosecutors through questionnaires, as well as qualitatively through interviews and file analysis. By collecting both qualitative and quantitative data, the study seeks to uncover the key factors that contribute to the decision-making process and offer a more detailed understanding of the judicial reasoning behind individual sentences. In this paper, we present some of the findings, focusing on the empirical relevance of various factors of specific deterrence in everyday court practice, as well as on how their importance varies across different types of sanctions and between judicial and prosecutorial decisions.

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