Justice Wood in R v Stanley Edward Fernando enunciated principles concerning the mitigating effect of certain social circumstances in respect of the sentencing of Aboriginal offenders.1 These principles have gone on to exert influence in New South Wales and ‘framed a seminal body of jurisprudence on the relevance of Aboriginality, alcoholism and disadvantage to sentencing’.2 They are currently ...

Social scientists have conducted dozens of studies designed to untangle the relationship between race and sentence severity. In fact, this issue “may well have been the major research inquiry for studies of sentencing in the 1970s and early 1980s.” Many of these early studies focused on the direct effect of race on sentencing, asking whether black, and occasionally Hispanic, offenders were sent...

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...

The U.S. Supreme Court has made a number of recent rulings in regard to the death penalty that will likely have the effec: sf increasing the use of psychiatry during the trial and sentencing process in capital cases. Any such changes are bound to increase the number of ethical dilemmas faced by psychiatrists involved in such work. The rulings affecting psychiatry include: (1) The Eighth Amendme...

Studies of criminal-court dispositions have traditionally aggregated courts along political and geographic boundaries. This article suggests that courts should be analyzed individually, even within the same jurisdiction, as a means of increasing the explanatory capacity of the variables involved. Further, it is contended that intercourt differences are a result of organizational infiuences oper...

In the legal systems of most western countries, defense attorneys present their sentencing recommendation after the prosecution has presented its sentencing demands. This procedural sequence for criminal cases is intended to balance the impact of both parties on the judge's final decision. Especially the positioning of the defense's plea at the end of the trial follows the fundamental legal pri...

This study investigates sentencing disparity under the guidelines in China. Drawing upon firsthand data of 509 criminal cases from a county-level court 2015, our research examines impact legal and extralegal factors on outcomes unveils multiplicity practices by judicial officers with three particular findings. First, have to great extent guided affected judges, especially regard their in/out de...