Good-Looking Crooks Get Off Lighter

Tuesday, May 13th, 2003

This is disturbing, if not surprising. Good-Looking Crooks Get Off Lighter — even a written description of a criminal as “handsome” or “pretty” is enough to reduce the sentence people hand out:

Good-looking criminals are likely to get lighter sentences even when people only have a written description of their looks, a Norwegian study showed on Monday.

The 500 university students surveyed handed down far milder punishments for crimes by a man described as “handsome” or a woman described as “pretty” than when the word was left out.

All the students were given a written description of crimes ranging from theft to rape and murder, but only half had a description of the looks of the offender.
[...]
The students said punishment for a handsome or pretty burglar who broke into a house and stole $36,760 should be 24 percent lower than for an average thief. For more serious crimes, such as murder and rape, the advised sentences were about 10 percent lighter. ($1 = 6.800 Norwegian Crown)

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