Locating the Judge within Sentencing Research

The Success of Judge Frankel's Sentencing Commission

Toward Automatic Support For Japanese Lay Judge System - Processing Precedent Factors For Sentencing Trends Discovery

In this paper we investigate factors that influence trends in sentencing process basing on newspaper articles in order to find lexical clues for automatic trial verdict estimation. We examine verdicts for murder cases of the last 10 years using 149 newspaper articles (1998-2001) and 160 precedents from a database available online (2001-2007). The results showed that there is a tendency to give ...

Have Inter-Judge Sentencing Disparities Increased in an Advisory Guidelines Regime? Evidence from Booker

The Federal Sentencing Guidelines were promulgated in response to concerns of widespread disparities in sentencing. After almost two decades of determinate sentencing, the Guidelines were rendered advisory in United States v. Booker. How has greater judicial discretion affected interjudge disparities, or differences in sentencing outcomes that are attributable to the mere happenstance of the se...

Locating Singing Voice Segments within Music Signals

A sung vocal line is the prominent feature of much popular music. It would be useful to reliably locate the portions of a musical track during which the vocals are present, both as a ‘signature’ of the piece and as a precursor to automatic recognition of lyrics. Here, we approach this problem by using the acoustic classifier of a speech recognizer as a detector for speech-like sounds. Although ...

Reassessing and Redirecting Research on Race and Sentencing*

A large portion of research on criminal sentencing over the past few decades has focused on the role of defendant race. The modal approach has encompassed regression-based studies of whether defendant race exerts a main effect on imprisonment decisions. Recent studies have employed more sophisticated statistical models, have incorporated information on both race and ethnicity, and have increasi...