Are You Judged By the Residence You Keep? Homicide Sentencing, Attribution and Neighborhood Context

This article investigates the effects of neighborhood residential context on sentencing outcomes for homicide defendants (N=636) in a large U.S. city and presents a theoretical model of judges’ place-based attributions about sentencing homicide defendants in an urban context. Defendants residing in neighborhoods characterized by a higher degree of disadvantage received more lenient sentences, a finding that is consistent with Cooney and Burt’s (2008) work regarding the effects of the geographic prevalence of homicide on sanctioning. These results support the use of offense-specific theoretical models and analyses of sanctioning and adjudication outcomes, as well as more broad-based consideration of the nature of spatial effects in sociological and criminological research.