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Former state judge laments "The Injustice of Sentencing Guidelines"

By Douglas A. Berman

Glenna Hall, a retired superior court judge from Washington state, has this new commentary in The Atlantic headlined "The Injustice of Sentencing Guidelines." Here is a snippet: For me, sentencing, particularly for drug crimes, was in many ways the hardest part of my work as a judge.  Not because the decisions or the work were hard (though of course they were), but because, given the restrictive nature of the sentencing guidelines in Washington, I had virtually no discretion or authority to consider anything about the human being standing before me.  I could consider only the nature of the crime, expressed in a number, and the number and kinds of offenses the defendant had committed, also expressed in a number.  From those two quantified factors was derived a quite narrow range I was required to use in imposing a sentence...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on March 24, 2011 (boomark / email).