Socio-economic factors affecting decision-making processes of judges, prosecutors and lawyers working in criminal law

In the researches on criminal justice, it is revealed that it is not possible for law enforcement officers to focus solely on the laws and their sanctions, since the decision-making process is open to the influence of so many factors as the individual's own characteristics. This situation causes differentiations and injustices in the reactions given to crimes and criminals in the criminal justice system. So much so that even if all the characteristics of two defendants who are tried for the same crime are the same, it is not possible for them to be sentenced to the same punishment. In this sense, in this thesis, it is aimed to analyze the socio-economic characteristics of law enforcement officers, judges, prosecutors and lawyers and the role of the socio-economic characteristics of the defendants in securing criminal justice, in other words, in the differences in the sentences given. Contrary to the researches in our country, in which theoretical and descriptive explanations are widely made, this study aims to understand and discuss criminal justice in an applied way. In addition, it is aimed to contribute to the literature by trying to understand the effects of the intersection of both law enforcement officers' and defendants' socio-demographic characteristics on the decisions. In this context, the theoretical frame of the study is based on the Intersectional Theory, which argues that the reaction of the criminal justice system to crime and criminals is shaped by the individual's identitical characteristics. The factual basis of the study consists of the data obtained from the field research conducted with in-depth interviews with 62 judges, prosecutors and lawyers working in Istanbul and participatory observation methods between September 2017 and April 2018. The study primarily focused on the socio-demographic characteristics of the judges, prosecutors and lawyers themselves, as well as their families. Afterwards, the role of the intersection of the participants' and the defendants' the socio-economic characteristics on the decisions is discussed. According to the data obtained, it has been found out that the features of law enforcement officers, which are distinguished by subtle nuances that they use when defining themselves in their decisions, differ in more main fault lines in their approaches to the socio-economic characteristics of the defendants. Our criminal justice system has a complicated and intricate feature that affected by thhe intersection of the different socio-cultural characteristics of defendants and law enforcement officers.