형사합의가 양형에 미치는 효과분석: 성폭력을 중심으로

The Effect of Criminal Case Agreement on Sentence Length in Sexual Assault Crime

The purpose of this article is to investigate the effect of criminal case agreement of victim and criminal on sentence length in sexual assault crime. Criminal case agree-ment refers to the inter-agreement of the criminal victim and the criminal that the crim-inal compensates victim's injuries and damages of the criminal act by monetary value, and in turn the victim agrees to terminate the criminal proceedings. The criminal case agreement is a objective indicator of restoration/restitution of victim's injuries and damages. In Korea, the criminal case agreement have been practiced as a non-official institution of the criminal procedure. The data analysed in this study were collected from sentencing in court of first in-stance in Korea, kept files in Prosecutorial Guideline System(PGS) of the Supreme Prosecutor’s Office by content analysis. The data consists of a total of 1,076 of sen-tencing of sexual assault crimes sentenced between June 1, 2012 and June 30, 2014. We used ANOVA, Regression Analysis and Logistic regression analysis etc. The results indicate that criminal case agreement was found to be positively related to the sentence length in sexual assault crime, while offence's seriousness, prior crimi-nal record, victim’s requests on criminal punishment have a significant effect on im-prisonment length. Such results seem to indicate that criminal case agreement is a sig-nificant factor in sexual assault crime, therefore we suggest that it should be considered a legal factor in criminal sentencing system. And we wish that this study will contrib-ute to the understanding and explanation of criminal sentencing system in our society. From our study, we hope that our society would attempt to develop a more just, fair sentencing system.