The thesis unveils how judges decide sentences in Cyprus and how they
employ mercy to contour their judgments by determining at the same time whether
these decisions are reached within or on the basis of a consistent legitimising
framework founded in or derived from moral legal theory. The study professes a
degree of originality in that it deals with the academically unexplored ground of the
Cypriot sentencing reality and investigates the role of mercy not only as a
component (or not) element of justice but, additionally, as a purposive ingredient of
judicial discretion in the determination of sentence. It emphasises positive rather
than normative analysis. It concentrates on how Cypriot judges sentence, and not
on how they should or ought to sentence, by depicting and explaining the judges’
method of reaching their sentencing decisions in substance and in form (or their
punishtecture as it will be characterised), including the demonstration on their part
of mercy to certain defendants at the sentencing stage (or mercying as it will
similarly be referred to). Following a discussion of relevant conceptual and
empirical literature the thesis present and analyses a substantial body of data
generated from a series of tête-à-tête semi-structured interviews conducted by the
researcher with the majority of the Cypriot judiciary between 2007 and 2008. The
research yields the judges’ views on the nature of the sentencing process and the
conceptions, design, structuring, and utterance of their resultant judgments within
the criminal justice context in which they find themselves acting. It presents what
they have said about the choice of punishment and mercy and reconstructs what
they may be taken to have meant by saying it; their aims and purposes in
sentencing; the constraints under which they operate; the way they exercise their
penal choices; and the use (or dismissal) of mercy as an etiological foundation of
sentencing rationales
