Samenvatting

This PhD project uses a mixed method design to study perceived procedural justice among defendants in Dutch single-judge criminal cases. To find out whether defendants are concerned with perceived procedural justice and to get a better grasp on the concept, the first empirical project reviewed here is an interview study among defendants conducted in 2017. In this study, defendants were interviewed after their court hearings about perceived procedural justice during their court hearings. The second empirical project, which started in January 2019, zooms in on experiences of defendants with a non-western migration background. Using a questionnaire, I examine whether and how perceived everyday discrimination affects defendants’ perceptions of and reactions to procedural justice during their court hearings. I am currently designing a third empirical study, which entails a scenario experiment among people with a non-western migration background. I plan to manipulate the level of perceived procedural justice during a hypothetical court hearing to examine its influence on, for instance, people’s trust in judges, and again assess whether people’s reactions to perceived procedural justice differ depending on their levels of perceived everyday discrimination. At the end of my dissertation, I plan to connect the empirical findings to the legal domain by assessing possible normative implications.