Decision making and information integration in the courts: The setting of bail.

Two studies were conducted to determine how real felony court judges decide the amount of bail to set. In the first, the judges were presented with ficti-tious case histories containing the relevant information in a factorial design. In the second, multiple regression techniques were used to examine the impact of different kinds of information on decisions made by judges in actual bail hearings. In the simulated cases, the judges seemed to be influenced most by the degree to which the accused was tied to the area and whether or not he had a prior criminal record. However, the judges actual bail decisions were not at all affected by these variables. Instead, their decisions were almost ex-clusively determined by the district attorneys recommendations. Both the district attorneys and the defense attorneys actual recommendations were found to be primarily based upon the severity of the crime. These results were discussed in terms of the utility of simulation and observational research for drawing applied and theoretical conclusions. In the American legal system, people accused of a crime are innocent until proven guilty. Proof of guilt is established only after appropriate court proceedings. A prob-lem arises, however, because there is often a long delay between the time a person is accused of a crime and the time that his trial comes to court. How should the accused indi-vidual be treated during this delay? If he is released, he may not voluntarily appear when his trial comes to court; if guilty, he may even commit additional crimes. On the other hand, detention of the accused may result in an innocent individual being held in jail for as long as a year (Goldfarb, 1965). Bail setting evolved in the American legal system in an attempt to deal with this societal problem. Bail hearings are usually held in public court soon after a person is indicted for a crime. The generally accepted legal purpose of these hearings is to determine the amount The data reported in this research were collected