The Depravity Standard for Violent Crimes

In violent crime cases, aggravating factors in United States criminal codes, such as heinous, atrocious, or depraved, are used to distinguish elements of the crime warranting more severe sentencing. These aggravating terms are vaguely defined and applied arbitrarily in violent cases. This paper details the development of a 25 item Depravity Standard to operationalize an evidence-based approach to distinguishing the worst of violent crimes. The items were applied to 393 detailed case files drawn from several American jurisdictions to develop and refine the item definitions, determine interrater reliability, and mine for the frequency of each item's occurrence. This information was combined with 1,590 participant responses ranking the relative depravity of each item to develop a straightforward scoring system for measuring depravity in violent cases. The Depravity Standard guide can seamlessly be applied to identify the worst violent crimes, and provide support for those cases that may deserve leniency or early-release.

Automated summary

This paper presents an evidence-based approach, called the Depravity Standard, to distinguish the worst of violent crimes. By utilizing 25 items and analyzing case files and participant responses, a scoring system for measuring the depravity in violent cases was developed. The Depravity Standard can be seamlessly applied to identify the most severe violent crimes and provide support for cases that may deserve leniency or early-release.