Journey times in the Scottish Criminal Justice System: analysis of equality factors of accused disposed in court
This paper investigates how the median journey times (from offence to verdict) for accused persons prosecuted in Scottish courts vary by their sex, age, ethnicity and socio-economic status (as measured by the Social Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD))
Median offence to verdict times by age bands are shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Distribution of median offence to verdict times by age bands.
Note: Outliers have been removed from the chart to allow a clearer view of the central tendency and spread of the data. Number of case-accused considered in each group and the corresponding percentages of the total are shown in the tables in the Annex.
The analysis shows that median offence to verdict times for accused under 25 years are higher than for the other age bands. The Kruskal-Wallis test showed that there are significant differences in the median offence to verdict times between age bands (p = 2.2e-16). The results of Mann-Whitney tests to determine which groups are statistically different from each other are shown in Table 2 of the Annex.
The median journey time for the under 25 age band (221 days) is significantly longer than the median time for the 25 to 60 and the over 60 years bands. Median journey time in the over 60 group is also significantly longer than the 25 to 60 years old group.
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