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"Race and Gender as Explicit Sentencing Factors"

By Douglas A. Berman

The title of this post is the title of this provocative new piece by Professor Carissa Byrne Hessick available via SSRN.  Here is the abstract: This Symposium Article briefly traces the history of race and gender as explicit sentencing factors, identifies how the explicit treatment differed for race versus gender at sentencing, and explores how those differences persist in the modern discussion about sentencing policy. Historically, there were several differences between race and gender as sentencing factors, including the persistence of system-wide sentencing distinctions based on gender long after such distinctions based on race were prohibited.  And while system-wide distinctions tended to disadvantage both racial minorities and women, distinctions made by individual judges when sentencing specific defendants resulted in longer sentences for racial minorities while women generally received shorter sentences than men convicted of similar offenses...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on February 19, 2010 (boomark / email).