Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Criminal Law Blogs -> Sentencing Law and Policy

Criminal Law

: Sentencing Law and Policy

Flawed HLR note on federal white-collar sentencing

By Douglas A. Berman

The April 2009 issue of the Harvard Law Review includes this student Notefocused on federal white-collar sentencing, titled "Go Directly to Jail: White Collar Sentencing After the Sarbanes-Oxley Act."  Here is how the note's conclusion starts: If the purpose of the WCCPA was to deter white collar crime, the statute?s harsh penalties have not achieved their goal.  Moreover, by introducing the potential for enormously disparate sentences for precisely the same crime, the WCCPA detracts from just punishment. This Note has proposed merely one way of reforming the sentencing process, in hopes that sentencing will become more consistent and predictable across judges and jurisdictions. Though the note does a reasonable job of documenting some of the challenges and problems with modern white-collar federal sentencing, there is a telling lack of sophistication in much of the analysis...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on April 23, 2009 (boomark / email).