The current study aims to identify legal and extralegal factors that might influence judges’ penal decision in criminal cases. It the same time, it intends to determine how the imposed penalties effect on prisons overcrowding, on ensuring public safety protection, as well as on solving related problems faced by offenders. Our study showed that judges perceive the decision process as being mainly based on a rational approach, minimizing or even denying an external influence from extralegal factors, while being interested in accessing personal data like offender's personality, psychosocial identity, education or economic status. Hence, our study may represents a starting point for exploring the mechanism underlying judicial decision, as a prerequisite for improving sentence's predictability.
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