국민참여재판의 배심단과 법원의 법적 판단 비교: 2018년부터 2020년까지 선고된 사건을 중심으로

This study analyzed 406 trial cases of lay participation trials sentenced from 2018 to 2020. A total of 731 categorical judgments (including decisions for guilty/not guilty, disposition, and order) and 351 sentencing judgments were encoded. The consistency of jury-court judgment was compared in consideration of the two potential factors affecting the disagreement of the decisions: decision type (whether there is one judgment or multiple judgments in the case) and unanimity (whether the jury decides unanimously or not). The jury’s sentencing was measured on the ordinal scale in each case, and the respective court’s judgment was encoded according to the jury’s measurement. As a result, the jury-court agreement rate of the categorical legal judgment was 95.6%. Generally, inconsistent judgments were cases in which the juries made pro-defendant decisions, and the courts were the opposite. Jury-court agreement of the categorical legal judgment was not related to the decision type, but the consistency of the sentencing judgments was. The jury-court sentencing disagreement was observed more frequently when the jury made two or more judgments. The jury’s decision unanimity was related to both categorical and sentencing decisions. In the case where the jury could not reach a unanimous decision, the categorical and sentencing judgment disagreement rates were higher than in the case where the jury reached a unanimous decision. Also, the cases in which the court sentenced more severely than the jury appeared more frequently. The implication of this study was to provide empirical evidence for the argument that the jury’s verdict (or opinion) should have a binding effect on the court's judgment by showing that the judgments of the jury and court are not different.