Law Commons^™

Graham V. Florida: Justice Kennedy's Vision Of Childhood And The Role Of Judges, Tamar R. Birckhead

Tamar R Birckhead

This short essay examines Graham v. Florida, the United States Supreme Court decision holding that the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause does not permit a juvenile offender to be sentenced to life in prison without parole for a nonhomicide crime. This essay argues that Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion is grounded not only in Roper v. Simmons, which invalidated the death penalty for juvenile offenders on Eighth Amendment grounds, and Kennedy v. Louisiana, which held that the Eighth Amendment prohibited the death penalty for the offense of rape of a child, but also in Establishment Clause cases set …

Appellate Review Of Sentences: Reconsidering Deference, Michael O'Hear

Michael O'Hear

For the past three decades, the national debate on sentencing policy has focused on the strengths and weaknesses of mandatory guidelines, with guidelines proponents arguing that unfettered judicial discretion at sentencing violates rule-of-law values. However, the number of states with mandatory guidelines, never a majority, has been declining in recent years, and even the federal system switched from mandatory to advisory guidelines in 2005. The trend away from mandatory guidelines has prompted renewed interest in the potential for appellate review of sentences to address rule-of-law concerns. But the appellate courts themselves have long resisted robust review on the ground that …

Why March To A Uniform Beat?: Adding Honesty And Proportionality To The Individualized Tunes Of Federal Sentencing, Jelani Jefferson Exum

Jelani Jefferson Exum

The Federal Sentencing Guidelines were initially created to increase uniformity in sentencing by diminishing the influence of individual judges’ biases in the sentencing determination. However, now that the Guidelines have been rendered advisory by the Supreme Court in United States v. Booker , and circuit courts have been directed to review sentences for “unreasonableness”, most of the Supreme Court’s attention has been focused on ensuring the preservation of uniformity, rather than recognizing the continued importance of bias reduction. The assumption, it seems, is that once uniformity in sentencing is achieved then the potential of judicial bias has been erased. However, …

Debacle: How The Supreme Court Has Mangled American Sentencing Law And How Justice Sotomayor Might Help Fix It, Frank O. Bowman

Frank O. Bowman III

This Article argues that the line of Supreme Court Sixth Amendment jury right cases that began with McMillan v. Pennsylvania in 1986, crescendoed in Blakely v. Washington and United States v. Booker in 2004-2005, and continues in 2009 in cases such as Oregon v. Ice, has been a colossal judicial failure. First, the Court has failed to provide a logically coherent, constitutionally based answer to the fundamental question of what limits the Constitution places on the roles played by the institutional actors in the criminal justice system. It failed to recognize that defining, adjudicating and punishing crimes implicates both the …

“Taking Lives: How The United States Has Violated The International Covenant Of Civil And Political Rights By Sentencing Juveniles To Life Without Parole”, Marina A. Magnuson

Marina A Magnuson

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Roper v. Simmons, which outlawed death sentences for juveniles, several human rights organizations have begun to question the legality of life sentences without parole for juvenile offenders. I will explore the issue of life sentences without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders and how they violate specific articles of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The United States ratified the ICCPR in 1992. However, it reserved the right, in exceptional circumstances, to treat juveniles as adults.

My comment will begin with a brief discussion of the …

The Mercy Of Judges As An Expression Of Natural Law, Mark Osler

Mark Osler

Even though there are strong personal incentives against it, federal judges abandon the sentencing guidelines in about one-third of all cases. Shockingly, when they sentence outside of the range, 96% of the time the sentence is below the range rather than above. The author argues that this tendancy can be seen as a natural law impulse towards mercy, and one that ultimately will undermine any limitation on sentencing discretion in the form of guidelines.

Extraordinary And Compelling: A Re-Examination Of The Justifications For Compassionate Release, William W. Berry Iii

William W Berry III

Federal law, unbeknownst to many, includes a provision that permits the immediate release of federal prisoners. This safety valve provision requires that the Director of the Bureau of Prisons make a motion on behalf of the prisoner in order to secure the prisoner's compassionate release. Far from being a veiled version of parole, this compassionate release provision is to be used only in circumstances deemed "extraordinary and compelling." While the Bureau of Prisons has read this language very narrowly for many years, considering only terminally ill inmates as candidates for compassionate release, the Sentencing Commission modified its Guideline commentary in …

No Rational Basis: The Pragmatic Case For Marijuana Law Reform, Eric Blumenson

Eric Blumenson

This article presents a critique of marijuana prohibition and suggests some alternative regulatory approaches that would be more productive and consonant with justice. Part I relies on a forty-year empirical record to demonstrate that (1) reliance on a law enforcement approach has aggravated rather than mitigated the risks involved with marijuana use, and (2) criminalization, which results in the arrest of more than 700,000 Americans annually for possession of any amount of marijuana, is an inhumane and destructive response to an act that almost 100 million Americans have committed. Part II assesses the relative merits of several alternative reform policies, …

Into The Twilight Zone: Informing Judicial Discretion In Federal Sentencing, Mary K. Ramirez

mary k ramirez

Into the Twilight Zone: Informing Judicial Discretion in Federal Sentencing

Recent changes in federal sentencing have shifted discretionary decision-making back to federal district court judges, while appellate courts review challenged sentences for reasonableness. Each judge brings considerable legal experience and qualifications to the bench, however, cultural experiences cannot necessarily prepare judges for the range of persons or situations they will address on the bench. Social psychologists who have studied social cognition have determined that the human brain creates categories and associations resulting in implicit biases and associations that are often unconscious or subconscious. Moreover, research suggests that such biases may …

Into The Twilight Zone: Informing Judicial Discretion In Federal Sentencing, Mary K. Ramirez

mary k ramirez

Into the Twilight Zone: Informing Judicial Discretion in Federal Sentencing

Recent changes in federal sentencing have shifted discretionary decision-making back to federal district court judges, while appellate courts review challenged sentences for reasonableness. Each judge brings considerable legal experience and qualifications to the bench, however, cultural experiences cannot necessarily prepare judges for the range of persons or situations they will address on the bench. Social psychologists who have studied social cognition have determined that the human brain creates categories and associations resulting in implicit biases and associations that are often unconscious or subconscious. Moreover, research suggests that such biases may …

Prosecutors As Punishment Theorists: Seeking Sentencing Justice, Michael A. Simons

Michael A Simons

Federal criminal law in the last 100 years has seen three distinct sentencing eras. Most surveys of these three sentencing eras have focused on the changing power of the judge: from unfettered discretion before the Sentencing Guidelines, to severely restricted discretion under the mandatory guidelines, to our current system of guided discretion under United States v. Booker. This article, however, focuses on the role of the prosecutor, which has changed dramatically over time. In the era of individualized sentencing, prosecutors typically either abdicated sentencing responsibility or made non-binding recommendations based on individualization principles. There was little reason for prosecutors to …

The Lost Meaning Of The Jury Trial Right, Laura I. Appleman

Laura I Appleman

This article contends that the right to a criminal jury trial right was originally a community right, not an individual one as currently understood. Using original historical research, I show that even the Sixth Amendment jury trial right, which sounds grammatically like a right of the accused, is actually a restatement of the collective right in Article III. The central claim of this Article is that nothing in the Sixth Amendment was meant to change this historical understanding and confer an individual right on defendants. My reading of the historical jury right has many important implications in both sentencing law …

Comity Of Errors: When Federal Sentencing Guidelines Ignore State Law Decriminalizing Sentences, James A. Shapiro

James A. Shapiro

Many states have sentences called “diversionary dispositions” that are not supposed to count as convictions under state law. The purpose of these so-called diversionary dispositions is to give first-time offenders for relatively minor crimes such as shoplifting a chance to keep their criminal records, or “rap sheets,” clean. If they do not commit another crime during the period of the diversionary disposition, then they usually have the opportunity to erase, or “expunge,” the diversionary disposition from their record. But whether they expunge their record or not, the diversionary disposition is never supposed to count as a conviction under state law. …

Role Of Theories Of Punishment In The Policy Of Sentencing, Krishna Kumari Areti

Krishna Kumari Areti prof

In this article it is proposed to analyze various theories of punishment. Austin considered sanction as an essential ingredient of law. It is only through sanction that obedience to law can be secured. Sanction is nothing but inflicting pain or injury upon the wrong doer. This in a way can be called punishment. The immediate consequence of a criminal act is punishment. The term punishment is defined as, "pain, suffering, loss, confinement or other penalty inflicted on a person for an offence by the authority to which the offender is subjected to." Punishment is a social custom and institutions are …

A Database Of Persons Convicted Of Felonies In Washtenaw County, Michigan, 1990-2007, Hon. Donald E. Shelton

Hon. Donald E. Shelton

This study is a database of information from Washtenaw County, Michigan, court records of approximately one-fourth of its convicted felons from 1990 to 2007. It includes 3,123 sentencing appearances for 3,992 crimes committed by 2,495 defendants. It includes 1126 probation violation resentencings for a total of 5,118 sentences. It contains demographics of defendants and the dynamics of their crimes and the sentencing process. Several official court reports in each case were examined. Preliminary descriptive and frequency analyses are reported to describe the database in detail and lay the groundwork for future sophisticated regression and other analyses. Special attention is given …

Standard Minimum Sentencing And Guideline Judgments: An Uneasy Alliance In The Way Of The Future, John L. Anderson

John L Anderson

This article will analyse the contemporary co-existence of standard non-parole periods and judicial guideline judgments in New South Wales. In R v Way, judicial interpretation of the standard non-parole provisions circumscribed their direct application. Subsequently, in cases such as R v Davies, R v AJP, R v Sangalang and R v Mills, the Court of Criminal Appeal has grappled with the meaning of the standard non-parole period as a "reference point" in sentencing and has expressed a view that the practical effect of these reference points will be to increase sentence levels for certain offence categories. Alongside this scheme stand …

"Smoke Gets In Your Mind": The Legal Framework For The Crime Of Arson, John L. Anderson

John L Anderson

No abstract provided.