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"Resuscitating Proportionality in Noncapital Criminal Sentencing"

By Douglas A. Berman

The title of this post is the title of this piece by Donna Lee just appearing here on SSRN.  Here's the abstract:Although the Eighth Amendment guarantees proportionality in noncapital criminal sentencing, federal and state courts have struggled when deciding individual cases, and the Supreme Court has failed to articulate legal rules that could promote the development of a coherent jurisprudence. Working within the governing law and building on the work already done by scholars who have focused on this problem, I propose three principles: transparency, limited deference, and a "felt sense of justice," that could guide the process of proportionality review and contribute to defining a retributivist touchstone for proportionality judgments...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on July 13, 2008 (boomark / email).