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"Is Punishment Relevant After All? A Prescription for Informing Juries of the Consequences of Conviction"

By Douglas A. Berman

The title of this post is the title of this new piece on SSRN by Jeffrey Bellin.  Here is the abstract: The American jury, once heralded as ?the great corrective of law in its actual administration,? has suffered numerous setbacks in the modern era.  As a result, jurors have largely become bystanders in a criminal justice system that relies on increasingly severe punishments to incarcerate tens of thousands of offenders each year.  The American criminal justice system disposes of most cases short of trial and increasingly casts the jurors? trial task as one of almost menial factfinding.  The jury is instructed to find the facts necessary for legal guilt, and suppress any concerns about whether a conviction and subsequent punishment is unjust...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on March 03, 2010 (boomark / email).