INTRODUCTION Ireland has an individualised system of sentencing in which judges exercise a relatively broad sentencing discretion. Since the foundation of the State in 1922 few attempts have been made to change or challenge the nature of the Irish sentencing system. This lack of reform, however, does not necessarily reflect widespread satisfaction with the system as a whole. Indeed, a recurrent...

Sentencing law is so indeterminate that it has been labeled the `high point in antijurisprudence'.1 The vast discretion left to judges when sentencing has resulted in widespread inconsistency in sentencing. The most obvious manner to attenuate judicial discretion is to introduce a comprehensive fixed penalty regime. Fixed penalties however, are almost universally condemned. They are regarded as...

As more and more nations prosecute copyright piracy cases, it is far from clear whether these nations, in seeking to protect legitimate copyright interests, will also recognize the need to achieve three goals in the sentencing of such cases. The first is honesty in sentencing: that is, avoiding situations in which the nominal sentence that a court initially imposes at sentencing may later be su...

The past several years have seen a surge of interest in using risk assessment in criminal sentencing, both to reduce recidivism by incapacitating or treating high-risk offenders and to reduce prison populations by diverting low-risk offenders from prison. We begin by sketching jurisprudential theories of sentencing, distinguishing those that rely on risk assessment from those that preclude it. ...

Chairman Biden, members of the Subcommittee, I am Diana Murphy, Chair of the United States Sentencing Commission (the " Commission ") and a judge on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. I appreciate the opportunity to testify today about federal cocaine sentencing policy, and the Subcommittee should be commended for holding this important hearing. Although Congress and the Commission have been ...

underwent a revolutionary but massively flawed revision of its approach to sentencing criminal defendants. Driven by concerns of disparate treatment and undue leniency in punishment, Congress created an independent agency, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, to formulate a new sentencing regime that would drastically limit the discretion of federal judges. The resulting body of law, known as the Se...

In July 2006 the Sentencing Advisory Council released a research paper entitled Myths and Misconceptions: Public Opinion versus Public Judgment about Sentencing (Gelb, 2006). The paper represented the culmination of a year-long project that was designed to examine and critically evaluate the current state of knowledge about public opinion on sentencing, as well as the methodological issues surr...

As incarceration rates have risen in the US, so has the overrepresentation of African Americans and Latinos among prison inmates. Whether and to what degree these disparities are due to bias in the criminal courts remains a contentious issue. This article pursues two lines of argument toward a structural account of bias in the criminal law, focusing on (1) cumulative disadvantages that may accr...

The heavy reliance on incarceration in the United States is unusual relative to U.S. history and relative to the use of incarceration in other nations. By now, the facts are common knowledge. We incarcerate our citizens at a rate that exceeds every other nation and that is multiple times (on the order of five to seven) the rates of other high-income countries. Moreover, since the mid-1970s, our...