ABSTRACT In most common-law jurisdictions world-wide, an offender’s remorse is a well-settled mitigating factor in sentencing, with judges obliged to take it into account when formulating an offender’s sentence. However, the importance of remorse in sentencing is matched by its mystery. Given remorse’s central role in the moral drama of the criminal justice process, it is crucial to investigate how remorse is evaluated, and also to understand the limitations of those evaluations. The present article seeks to contribute to that effort by exploring what is involved in judges coming to know — and claiming to know — that ‘this offender is remorseful’. Drawing on in-depth original interviews with 20 magistrates and judges in New South Wales, Australia, we explore how judges themselves understand their own ways of knowing about remorse. We then look at two basic scenes of offender remorse: remorse in the courtroom and remorse outside the courtroom. Many judges want to see remorse in the courtroom, and are often confident that they know it when they see it. But, at the same time, as we shall see, many judges also want evidence of the offender’s remorse outside the courtroom.

中文翻译：

---

法庭忏悔：法官怎么知道？

摘要在世界范围内大多数普通法司法管辖区，罪犯的悔恨是量刑中一个很好解决的减刑因素，法官在制定罪犯的判决时必须考虑到这一点。然而，悔恨在量刑中的重要性与其神秘相匹配。鉴于悔恨在刑事司法程序的道德戏剧中的核心作用，调查如何评估悔恨以及了解这些评估的局限性至关重要。本文试图通过探索法官知道——并声称知道——“这个罪犯是悔恨的”所涉及的内容来为这一努力做出贡献。通过对澳大利亚新南威尔士州 20 位地方法官和法官的深入原始采访，我们探索了法官自己如何了解自己了解悔恨的方式。然后我们看一下罪犯悔恨的两个基本场景：法庭内的悔恨和法庭外的悔恨。许多法官希望在法庭上看到悔恨，并且往往确信当他们看到时就知道了。但是，与此同时，正如我们将要看到的，许多法官也希望在法庭外获得罪犯悔恨的证据。