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Sentencing Guidelines, Discrimination, and Variance Explained

By Kent Scheidegger et al.

From my stack of post-SCOTUS-term catch-up reading comes this executive summary of a study titled "Assessing Consistency and Fairness in Sentencing: A Comparative Study in Three States." It was released May 22 by the National Center for State Courts. I was not able to find the full study on the web site. Movements to curb discretion in sentencing came into vogue in the 1970s and 1980s due to a suspicion that too much discretion was contributing to discrimination on the basis of impermissible factors, especially race. That concern was a large factor in the Supreme Court's decision tossing out unbridled discretion in capital sentencing in Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972), as Justice Thomas explained in his great concurrence in Graham v...continue to full post

Full post as published by Crime and Consequences on July 17, 2008 (boomark / email).