This study employed qualitative interviews with judges from a failed sentencing guidelines state to investigate the dynamics of the structured sentencing effort and leading causes of its failure. The ...findings point to concerns over losing judicial discretion and skepticism over efforts to replace a system of substantive justice with one of formal rationality. In addition, the lack of success of the federal guidelines cast a shadow over the state efforts. The results also suggest that stakeholders may not have appreciated key features of sentencing guidelines, including the binding degree of guidelines along the advisory-presumptive continuum, and the key mechanism of departures. Drawing on the study's findings and the recent work of the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code: Sentencing, the paper proposes that renewed guideline efforts should make the retention of departure discretion a central narrative of the reform discussion. New efforts could allay some of the historical concerns over guidelines by carefully contrasting the federal experience from successful state systems, and by stressing the balance between imparting uniformity and retaining judicial discretion.
Despite shifts in Western liberal democracies towards stronger criminal justice responses to domestic violence, the issue of sentencing disparity between domestic and non-domestic violence offending ...cases remains largely neglected. Using a population of cases sentenced in the New South Wales (Australia) lower courts between January 2009 and June 2012, we report multivariate analyses of the sentencing of domestic violence and non-domestic violence offences. Results show that when sentenced under statistically similar circumstances, domestic violence offenders are less likely than those convicted of crimes outside of domestic contexts to be sentenced to prison although the substantive impact is small. Further, of those imprisoned, domestic violence offenders receive significantly shorter sentenced terms. Our findings also suggest that, for domestic violence offences, there may be a 'punishment cost' to being older, male and Indigenous. The role of outmoded stereotypical assumptions around domestic violence in sentencing decision making is discussed.
Using rich data linking federal cases from arrest through to sentencing, we find that initial case and defendant characteristics, including arrest offense and criminal history, can explain most of ...the large raw racial disparity in federal sentences, but significant gaps remain. Across the distribution, blacks receive sentences that are almost 10 percent longer than those of comparable whites arrested for the same crimes. Most of this disparity can be explained by prosecutors’ initial charging decisions, particularly the filing of charges carrying mandatory minimum sentences. Ceteris paribus, the odds of black arrestees facing such a charge are 1.75 times higher than those of white arrestees.
Summary
When and if the will to roll back mass incarceration and to create just, fair, and effective sentencing systems becomes manifest, the way forward is clear.
First, three‐strikes, mandatory ...minimum sentence, and comparable laws should be repealed.
Second, any three‐strikes, mandatory minimum sentence, and comparable laws that are not repealed should be substantially narrowed in scope and severity.
Third, any three‐strikes, mandatory minimum sentence, and comparable laws that are not repealed should be amended to include provisions authorizing judges to impose some other sentence “in the interest of justice.”
Fourth, life‐without‐possibility‐of‐parole laws should be repealed or substantially narrowed.
Fifth, truth‐in‐sentencing laws should be repealed.
Sixth, criminal codes should be amended to set substantially lower maximum sentences scaled to the seriousness of crimes.
Seventh, every state that does not already have one should establish a sentencing commission and promulgate presumptive sentencing guidelines.
Eighth, every state that does not already have one should establish a parole board and every state should establish a parole guidelines system.
Ninth, every state and the federal government should reduce its combined rate of jail and prison confinement to half its 2014 level by 2020.
Tenth, every state should enact legislation making all prisoners serving fixed terms longer than 5 years, or indeterminate terms, eligible for consideration for release at the expiration of 5 years, and making all prisoners 35 years of age or older eligible for consideration for release after serving 3 years.
These proposals are evidence‐based and mostly technocratic. Those calling for prison population targets and reducing the lengths of sentences being served may seem bold to some. Relative to the problems they address, they are modest and partial. Decreasing rates of imprisonment by half in the United States, a country with comparatively low crime rates, to a level that will remain 3 to 3.5 times those of other developed Western countries, can hardly be considered overly ambitious.
Sentencing is the most important process in criminal law. On the other hand, the state can have more intervention and force to its citizens. Sentencing not only is the most controversial and ...sensitive area of criminal law but also is the vaguest area in criminal justice system. Sentencing is not as easy as it appears. Each crime, each criminal, each criminal trial is completely different from another one. Sentencing is an important concern for those who seek the judicial reforms. Recently, in the most countries around the world, the sentencing practices became reformed and sentencing based on gender, race, ethnic, socio-economic statues disappeared to some extent. There are four important schemes of sentencing: definite sentencing, indefinite sentencing, presumptive sentencing, and mandatory sentencing. This article tries to explore these schemes and explain the characteristics of each scheme. This article has comparative approach to UK criminal justice system and Iran criminal justice system.
When compared to research on the association between immigration and crime, far less attention has been given to the relationship between immigration, citizenship, and criminal punishment. As such, ...several fundamental questions about how noncitizens are sanctioned and whether citizenship is a marker of stratification in U.S. courts remain unanswered. Are citizens treated differently than noncitizens—both legal and undocumented—in U.S. federal criminal courts? Is the well-documented Hispanic-white sentencing disparity confounded by citizenship status? Has the association between citizenship and sentencing remained stable over time? And are punishment disparities contingent on the demographic context of the court? Analysis of several years of data from U.S. federal courts indicates that citizenship status is a salient predictor of sentencing outcomes—more powerful than race or ethnicity. Other notable findings include the following: accounting for citizenship substantially attenuates disparities between whites and Hispanics; the citizenship effect on sentencing has grown stronger over time; and the effect is most pronounced in districts with growing noncitizen populations. These findings suggest that as international migration increases, citizenship may be an emerging and powerful axis of sociolegal inequality.
Numerous studies have addressed the question: Are African-Americans treated more harshly than similarly situated whites? This research employs meta-analysis to synthesize this body of research. ...One-hundred-sixteen statistically independent contrasts were coded from 71 published and unpublished studies. Coded study and contextual features are used to explain variation in research findings. Analyses indicate that African-Americans generally are sentenced more harshly than whites; the magnitude of this race effect is statistically significant but small and highly variable. Larger estimates of unwarranted disparity are found in contrasts that examine drug offenses, imprisonment or discretionary decisions, do not pool cases from several smaller jurisdictions, utilize imprecise measures, or omit key variables. Yet, even when consideration is confined to those contrasts employing key controls and precise measures of key variables, unwarranted racial disparities persists. Further, a substantial proportion of variability in study results is explained by study factors, particularly methodological factors.
The idea of reducing public punitiveness through providing information and encouraging deliberation has attracted considerable interest. However, there remains no solid evidence of durable changes in ...attitude. The study presented here provides a test of the hypothesis that information combined with deliberation can affect general measures of punitiveness, confidence in the courts and acceptance of alternatives to imprisonment (the three dependent variables). The study involved a pre-test, post-test experimental design. Participants were randomly allocated to either an intervention group or a control condition. Statistically significant changes in the dependent variables were observed immediately following the intervention but these changes were not sustained when measured at follow-up nine months later. Further, at the time of the follow-up the differences between the control group scores and the intervention group scores were not significantly different. The observed changes immediately following the intervention are seen to be a function of the changed relationship of the respondent to the task. The implications of the results for integrating public perspectives into policy are discussed. It is argued that rather than a focus on public education, a more productive direction is to focus on the way the public is engaged on matters concerning punishment.
The influence of judges' personal moral values on their sentencing decisions is of longstanding interest to researchers and the public. Few studies, however, have examined this influence empirically. ...Using a unique data set that combines a survey of 81 criminal court judges with archival data on their 40,385 criminal sentences over a 2-year period, and drawing on Moral Foundations Theory, we hypothesize that judges with strong care and fairness intuitions will sentence defendants less severely while judges with strong loyalty, authority, and sanctity intuitions will sentence defendants more severely. We further hypothesize that these effects will be heightened when the defendant is from a racial minority group. Results show that sentencing outcomes are largely independent of judges’ moral intuitions, except that fairness intuitions tend to increase leniency, especially when the defendant is Black, and sanctity intuitions tend to decrease leniency. Implications for future research on sentencing are discussed.
PDF
