UNDERSTANDING JUDGE’S DECISION DISPARITY IN INDONESIAN CORRUPTION CASES

Abstrack-One of the biggest weapons in law enforcement to deal with rampant corruption is the judges. Judges are considerably independent and their authorities are guaranteed by the constitution. A judge’s decision ought to reflect justice for all, both in terms of benefit and legal certainty. Disparity is not an exclusive practice, but rather something commonly found in many states. It is impossible to truly eradicate disparity in every judge’s decision; however, one should try to minimize it since disparity can significantly harm the court system. Not to mention, it is also publicly regarded as an evidence of legal injustice, thus it can also lead to the increase of public distrust towards the law in general and the court system in particular. This study aims to analyze the construction of corruption cases and the punishments involved according to the Indonesian Acts. We also intend to describe the various ways the judges decided on corruption cases in Indonesia and granted punishments to the perpetrators to find out if there are evidences for disparity. This study can be categorized as a dogmatic legal research or normative legal research. It is a dogmatic legal research since it regards the law as a whole system that comprises legal principles, legal norms, and rules. It is also a normative legal research since we mainly analyzed normative law that involves both primary legal materials and secondary legal materials. We also used a combined research approaches between case approach and conceptual approach to analyze our research result through induction-interpretation conceptualization method. Keyword: corruption, disparity, judge decisio