Naar een verbetering van strafmotiveringen: een onderzoek naar de effectiviteit van het PROMIS model

The advancement of the justification of criminal sentences. Research into the effectiveness of the PROMIS model

In response to both laymen and professionals criticizing the obscurity of criminal sentences, the Dutch judiciary, in 2004, started a large-scale project called Promis. The aim of the project was to improve the justification of judicial decisions and thus advance communication between the criminal judge, the people concerned and, finally, the general public. To achieve this goal, the initiators of Promis developed a model. The positive evaluations of the project did, however, provide no clear indications whether the justifications of criminal sentences that were presented after the introduction of the model, provided more insight in the argumentation for the type of punishment and the length of the punishment that were imposed than the ones preceding Promis. This uncertainty induced us to try and ascertain, by means of a comparison of corpora, whether the argumentation
in criminal sentences has indeed been improved. The results of the research are presented in this contribution.