Defending a Sentence: The Judicial Establishment of Sentencing Entrapment and Sentencing Manipulation Defenses

Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions∗

Racial and gender disparities are prevalent in the criminal justice system, but the sources of these disparities remain largely unknown. This paper investigates whether judge political affiliation contributes to these disparities using data on over 500,000 federal defendants linked to sentencing judge. Exploiting random case assignment, we find that Republican appointed judges sentence black de...

Judicial Fact-Finding at Sentencing

Sentencing guidelines, judicial discretion and plea bargaining

The United States Sentencing Commission was created to develop federal sentencing guidelines, which restrict judicial discretion and were found to increase the average sentence length while leaving unchanged the likelihood of resolution through plea bargaining. A game theoretic model is developed in which a sentencing commission may impose guidelines or defer to judicial discretion; then a defe...

Summary. Sentencing law and sentencing decision making

The initial context of this research – judicial cooperation with regard to consistency in sentencing This dissertation is part of a research project in which the phenomenon of judicial cooperation in several areas of the law has been taken as a starting point. The concept of judicial cooperation describes informal structures and products thereof of judicial policymaking for the purpose of the s...

Adolescent Sex Offending: an Analysis of Judicial Sentencing Remarks

The sentencing of young people convicted of sexual violence presents a dilemma: how to reconcile the seriousness of the offence and the youthfulness of the offender? And how to censure these offences and stress their seriousness without imposing penalties that are too harsh? The literature suggests that adult sex offenders, especially those who abuse children, are dealt with in an increasingly ...