Punishment, sentencing and probation

Hypothetical Sentencing Decisions Are Associated With Actual Capital Punishment Outcomes

Recent research has highlighted a relationship between perceptions of trustworthiness from faces and capital sentencing outcomes. Here, we extended those findings by replicating the relationship between trustworthiness and the death penalty among a new sample of targets convicted of capital murder in Arkansas and by demonstrating that facial trustworthiness guides naive sentencing decisions. Fi...

Competence, Culpability, and Punishment: Implications of Atkins for Executing and Sentencing Adolescents

The Supreme Court has explored the issues of culpability, proportionality, and deserved punishment most fully in the context of capital punishment. In death penalty decisions addressing developmental impairments and culpability, the Court has considered the cases of defendants with mental retardation and older adolescents, and has created an anomalous inconsistency by reaching opposite conclusi...

Chapter Two: Impact of the Sentencing Guidelines on the Certainty and Severity of Punishment

The text and legislative history of the Sentencing Reform Act [SRA], reviewed in Chapter One, make clear that the SRA aimed to increase the certainty and severity of punishment by eliminating parole and increasing sentencing severity for some crimes. Congress instructed the Commission to ensure that “the guidelines reflect the fact that, in many cases, current sentences do not accurately reflec...

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...

Probation and Re-Education