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Discretion Without Guidance, William W. Berry Iii

William W Berry III

The exercise of the discretion accorded to a judge in determining the sentence of a convicted criminal offender bears directly on the coherence and the legitimacy of any criminal justice system. The United States federal criminal sentencing system has, at various points in time over the past century, employed schemes that have approached either the one extreme of unfettered judicial discretion or the other extreme of highly restricted judicial discretion. In January, 2005, the United States Supreme Court held in United States v. Booker that the mandatory federal sentencing guidelines, the source of the strict restriction on judicial discretion for …