ABSTRACT
This chapter presents findings on the penal demand of laypersons in France and Germany. The analysis focuses on how laypersons express normative penal preferences such as retributivism, utilitarianism and ostracism when they ponder criminal cases. We used the game of cards as a deliberative research approach which helps to identify different categories of respondents within each country. In France and Germany, pure retributivist or consequentialist profiles are rare. By contrast, most respondents juggle different penal preferences depending on the nature of the criminal case that they judge. There is a minority of respondents whose judgements are guided by one penal philosophy and who are likely to present the same kind of rationality irrespective of the specificities of the criminal case. A significant part of the respondents uses different penal philosophies depending on the criminal case, which lends credibility to the thesis that laypersons have nuanced penal demands. Among these respondents, the French and the Germans share common rationalities: even though retributivism is the most widely used penal philosophy, utilitarian and rehabilitative reasonings, taken together, are as popular as retributivism. Finally, in a minority of cases, respondents combine different penal preferences to resolve one case.
