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Morality Influences How People Apply the Ignorance of the Law Defense

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Adam L. Alter ,
Julia Kernochan  and
John M. Darley
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Abstract

In four empirical studies, we showed that laypeople apply the ignorance of the law defense differently depending on the perceived morality of the defendant's course of conduct at the time of the illegal act. Moral and neutral defendants who pled ignorance of the law were afforded leniency, whereas immoral defendants were sentenced as though they were not ignorant, even when defendants in all three conditions violated identical laws. These findings suggest that laypeople adopt a just deserts approach to criminal law, which influences their responsiveness to a criminal defendant's claim to be ignorant of the law. We discuss the implications of these findings for criminal law and argue that legal doctrine should reflect laypeople's moral intuitions.

Type
Articles of General Interest
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , December 2007 , pp. 819 - 864
Copyright
© 2007 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

We thank James Chu, Natasha Fedotova, and Manish Pakrashi for their assistance in conducting this research. The third author would also like to thank the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for its support and hospitality during the year in which this article was written.

References

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