Every American state has created new intermediate sanctions in recent years and nearly half have, have had, or are considering having sentencing guidelines. Guidelines can reduce sentencing disparities, including race, gender, and geographical disparities; effect changes in statewide sentencing patterns; and coordinate sentencing policies and corrections resources. Well-managed intermediate san...

Apparent inconsistency in criminal sentencing at District Court level in New Zealand (NZ) might also be expected for health and safety in employment (HSE) offences. We review relevant legislation and the guidelines established in the de Spa appeal case, and estimate a model of HSE sentencing variability distinguishing the de Spa criteria (and a subset similar to those used in the formal U.S. cr...

The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 explicitly prohibits the use of demographic characteristics in determining prison sentence, yet researchers continue to find evidence of disparity in sentences on the basis of race, ethnicity and gender. We employ a quantile regression technique that estimates the black-white sentencing gap across the entire sentencing distribution, rather than only at the mean...

Although several theoretical perspectives have been used to study judicial discretion in the sentencing process, the focal concerns perspective has been one of the dominant theoretical frameworks used in the sentencing literature. The original work on focal concerns in sentencing revolved around the treatment of female defendants; this perspective has been expanded to include explanations of ra...

This article contends that it is time to take a critical look at a series of binary categories which have dominated the scholarly and reform epistemologies of the sentencing decision process. These binaries are: rules versus discretion; reason versus emotion; offence versus offender; normative principles versus incoherence; aggravating versus mitigating factors; and aggregate/tariff consistency...

The legal standards for reviewing claims of ineffective assistance of counsel at sentencing are underdeveloped. In other contexts, defendants seeking to prove ineffective assistance must demonstrate that counsel’s performance fell below appropriate professional standards and that there is a reasonable probability that, but for counsel’s deficient performance, the result of the proceeding would ...

Objective. Many studies find that females benefit from their gender in sentencing decisions. Few researchers, however, address whether the gender-sentencing association might be stronger for some crimes, such as minor nonviolent offending, and weaker for other offenses, such as serious violent crime. Method. Using a large random sample of convicted offenders in Texas drawn from a statewide proj...

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...

Most scholars focus on whether the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines effectively constrain judges or result in disparate decisions based on a court’s or defendant’s location. With few exceptions, studies of the effect of judicial attributes on federal-district-court-sentencing cases have been stymied by the United States Sentencing Commission’s refusal to release judges’ names in their databases of se...

After a quarter century of changes, there is no longer anything that can be called “the American system” of sentencing and corrections. As recently as 1975, there was a distinctively American approach, usually referred to as indeterminate sentencing, and it had changed little in the preceding 50 years. Its core features were broad authorized sentencing ranges, parole release, and caseby-case de...