Enigma in Law
Vol. 3 No. 2 (2025): Enigma in Law

Unwarranted or Warranted? A Jurimetric Analysis of Custodial-Sentence Disparity in Indonesian Corruption Cases after the 2020 Supreme Court Sentencing Guideline

Muhammad Hasan (Department of Social Sciences, Enigma Institute, Palembang, Indonesia)
Caelin Damayanti (Department of Humanity, Bright Institute, Palu, Indonesia)



Article Info

Publish Date
22 Jul 2026

Abstract

Sentencing disparity has long been diagnosed as a structural weakness of Indonesian anti-corruption enforcement, yet most scholarship remains doctrinal or confined to single-court case studies. This article applies a jurimetric (quantitative-empirical) approach to measure the magnitude, structure, and predictors of custodial-sentence disparity in corruption (tindak pidana korupsi) cases four years after the Supreme Court issued sentencing guidelines through Regulation No. 1 of 2020. An original dataset of 47 first-instance convictions for state-financial-loss corruption (Articles 2 and 3) decided in 2024 was hand-coded from the Supreme Court Decision Directory across eight Special Criminal Courts spanning Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and Nusa Tenggara. Custodial term, statutory fine, and court-ordered restitution were analysed using dispersion statistics (coefficient of variation, Gini coefficient), the Kruskal–Wallis and Brown–Forsythe tests, rank correlation, and ordinary-least-squares regression. Custodial sentences ranged from 5 to 180 months (mean 34.7; median 24) with a coefficient of variation of 0.91 and a Gini coefficient of 0.42; court means differed by a factor of 3.5. The magnitude of state financial loss was significantly but only moderately associated with sentence length (Spearman rho = 0.53; ordinary-least-squares R-squared = 0.26), leaving roughly three-quarters of variance unexplained. Among defendants receiving the identical modal fine, sentences still varied 7.2-fold. On the balance of evidence, a substantial share of the disparity is plausibly unwarranted, indicating that the 2020 guideline has not yet delivered structured proportionality. The study supplies a replicable coding protocol and open dataset for large-N replication and grounds a concrete de lege ferenda reform agenda.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

law

Publisher

Subject

Humanities Environmental Science Law, Crime, Criminology & Criminal Justice

Description

Focus Enigma in Law focused on the development of law fields for human well-being. Scope Enigma in Law publishes articles which encompass all aspects of law fields, especially all type of original articles, review articles, narrative review, meta-analysis, systematic review, mini-reviews and book ...