Examples of current and recently completed PhD research projects include:

• 'Automatism and Voluntariness: Towards a New Framework for Assigning Criminal Responsibility' (Ioana Dulcu);
• ‘A Policy Oriented Approach to Witness Protective Measures at the International Criminal Court’ (Steven Kayuni);
• 'Globalisation of Plea Bargaining and its Emergence in Nigeria: A Critical Analysis of Practice, Problems and Priorities in Criminal Justice Reform' (Abubakar Bukar Kagu);
• ‘Criminalisation, civil preventive orders and the creation of localised penal codes’ (Stavros Demetriou);
• ‘Captured Red Handed: The Impact of Social Media on the Evolving Concepts of the Criminal Defendant and the Presumption of Innocence’ (Rachel Gimson);
• ‘Brainwashing as a Defence in English Law’ (Qurat-ul-ain Jahangir);
• ‘The Impact of Disease and Addiction Etiology on Leniency in Sentencing’ (Nik Sinclair-House);
• ‘Changing Justice: Assessing the Law on Coercive Control in the Context of Contemporary Understandings of Intimate Partner Abuse’ (Cassandra Wiener);
• ‘Are Rwandan Rape Trials Influenced by Rape Myths?’ (Christophe Bizimungu).
• '"Illuminating the past to make the future safer?" Exploring Domestic Homicide Reviews as a mechanism for change' (James Rowlands).

If you are interested in pursuing doctoral research at Sussex, please contact potential supervisors directly to discuss your proposal or, alternatively, submit your proposal to the PGR office.

Shannon Plant

Research bio: Shannon’s research interests include global cannabis policy, meaning in life, and the structures underlying criminal sentencing outcomes, with a focus on how these relate to legal standards in principle and practice. Her current work examines decision-making processes in criminal sentencing, considering the extent to which official guidelines and their application in practice allow for important differences in individual cases to be reflected in sentencing outcomes, and investigating the underlying psychological factors influencing those outcomes.