Law Commons^™

The Power Of Bureaucracy In The Response To Blakely And Booker, Ronald F. Wright

Ronald F. Wright

How will different jurisdictions respond to the recent Supreme Court decisions in Blakely v. Washington and United States v. Booker, which require jury fact-finding to support certain types of sentences? The best clues in predicting the answer to this question come from the people who know this world best, the sentencing bureaucracy. Sentencing commissions, mostly for benign reasons, hope to preserve their own place in the sentencing structure, or to expand their role if possible. The particulars shift from place to place, but this powerful tendency of bureaucracies for self-preservation offers a reliable way to predict the reactions of sentencing …

Sentencing Commissions As Provocateurs Of Prosecutor Self-Regulation, Ronald F. Wright

Ronald F. Wright

This Article examines potential efforts by sentencing commissions to influence the work of prosecutors, especially the charges they select and the plea bargains they enter. The practical objections to prosecutorial guidelines issuing from a sentencing commission emphasize two problems: the linguistic impossibility of creating meaningful guidelines and the political impossibility of promulgating them. But experience in the states casts doubt on each of these objections. Some states have codified preexisting prosecutor guidelines, generated by prosecutors themselves, while other states have prompted prosecutors to develop their own internal guidance.

Prompted self-regulation of prosecutors will prove most effective when the ambitions for …

The Wisdom We Have Lost: Sentencing Information And Its Uses, Marc L. Miller, Ronald F. Wright

Ronald F. Wright

Both federal and state experience in sentencing over the last three decades suggest that sentencing data and knowledge most often lead to wisdom when they are collected with particular uses and users in mind. Ironically, greater reliance on data and expertise can democratize the making and testing of sentencing policy. When data are collected and published with many different users in mind, a variety of participants in the sentencing process can join the Commission as creators of sentencing wisdom, including Congress, state legislatures, state sentencing commissions, sentencing judges, and scholars.

Under the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, Congress envisioned federal …