This research uses status characteristics theory to expand our knowledge of the effects of status variables (e.g., race, education) and emotional displays on the antecedents of sentencing - evaluations of offender dangerousness and offense seriousness. We present a theoretical formulation that combines three areas of status characteristics research - reward expectations, individual evaluative s...

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...

Certain genes and neurobiology ('neurogenetics') may predispose some people to violent behavior. Increasingly, defendants introduce neurogenetic evidence as a mitigating factor during criminal sentencing. Identifying the cause of a criminal act, biological or otherwise, does not necessarily preclude moral or legal liability. However, valid scientific evidence of an inherited proclivity sometime...

Criminal sanctions involve the deliberate infliction of hardship on offenders.1 In sentencing, the state acts in its most coercive and decisive manner: ‘the state may use its most awesome power: the power to use force against its citizens and others’.2 Despite the importance of the interests at stake in the sentencing realm, sentencing is arguably the least coherent, predictable and principled ...

We present a positive political theory of criminal sentencing and test it using data from the United States Sentencing Commission. Under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, judges can use “offense-level adjustments” (fact-based decisionmaking) to lengthen or shorten the Guidelines’ presumptive sentences. Judges also can use “departures” from the Guidelines (law-based decisionmaking) to lengthen or ...

The determinants of sentencing are of much interest in criminal justice and legal research. Understanding the determinants of sentencing decisions is important for ensuring transparent, consistent, and justifiable sentencing practice that adheres to the goals of sentencing, such as the punishment, rehabilitation, deterrence, and incapacitation of the offender, as well as reparation for the vict...

Judicial sentencing decisions should be guided by facts, not by chance. The present research however demonstrates that the sentencing decisions of experienced legal professionals are influenced by irrelevant sentencing demands even if they are blatantly determined at random. Participating legal experts anchored their sentencing decisions on a given sentencing demand and assimilated toward it ev...

Sentencing commissions, administrative agencies charged to develop and promulgate standards for sentencing, were first proposed early in the 1970s and first established in 1978. Of four recent major sentencing reform approaches-the others being parole guidelines, voluntary sentencing guidelines, and statutory determinate sentences-only sentencing commission systems continue to be created. Despi...

Traditional sentencing in America by the way of mass incarceration is a three-fold failure: it does not deter crime, it institutionalizes the inmates and it does so at an incredible cost to the state. There are alternative sentencing measures that can be implemented, and have been done so in various states, but there are not enough statistics that show alternative sanctions will reduce recidivi...

This paper exploits machine learning methods to separate robbery and intimidation cases, and predicting their sentencing by considering defined legal factors. We introduce a framework to fetch 21 legal factor labels of robbery and intimidation cases, then use the labels for case classification and sentencing prediction. Our experiments show that the legal factor labels can indeed improve the re...