Suchergebnisse

Compared to some other areas of governmental activity, the federal presence in the realm of sentencing law and policy has remained insignificant. Setting aside the growth in federal criminal jurisdiction per se, which still accounts for less than 8 percent of all incarcerated offenders, Congress historically has shown little interest in influencing the goals or the particulars of state sentencing systems and has done little to help fund those systems. This may, however, be changing. There are now calls to expand the federal government's role in both paying for and controlling the contours of criminal punishment at the state level. These developments raise long-term questions concerning the appropriate allocation of federal, state, and local authority over sentencing law. Surprisingly, very little consideration has been given to these issues. This article suggests a pragmatic analysis for addressing them. It posits that, for the foreseeable future, it would be a mistake to move toward a federally dominated national sentencing policy.

In recent years, various determinate sentencing models have been proposed to promote equity in sentencing and prisoner release certainty. This article examines the implementation of Minnesota's determinate sentencing law as it relates to prisoners and the state correctional system, It reviews the extent of the reform's success in achieving predictability in prisoner release dates and equity in sentencing. Organizational, political, and transitional problems in the implementation of the determinacy concept are discussed. In particular, resistance to change among parole board and correctional treatment staff members and a prisoner movement for retroactivity are highlighted. Conditions that could lead to replications of Minnesota's experience in other states are reviewed.

The thesis of this Article is that the substantive criminal law is the missing element in sentencing reform. If comprehensive sentencing reform strategies are to have lasting effect, legislatures must reintroduce the criminal law to the sentencing process. This step will require a rekindled interest in a moral analysis of the substantive criminal law and the enactment of greatly reduced statutory sentence maximums, along with more conventional institutional changes to structure discretion and increase official accountability. Objections to American sentencing procedures range from the principled to the practical. Part II of this Article summarizes the basic objections that have influenced recent sentencing initiatives.All concern the unstructured discretion and absence of official accountability that characterize indeterminate sentencing. Part III then outlines the sentencing law reforms that have been proposed or adopted in response to these objections. Part IV asserts and at-tempts to demonstrate that sentencing in America has been divorced from the criminal law, and that present reform proposals are inadequate because they fail to address this separation. At trial, constitutional rights, the law of evidence, and the criminal burden of proof provide the defendant with important procedural safeguards. In addition, the state must meet all substantive criminal law requirements before the defendant can be convicted. Most convictions, however, result from guilty pleas. In these cases trial rights and protections are unimportant. Under an indeterminate sentencing scheme, defendants have virtually no rights at sentencing except for procedural rights such as the rights to counsel and to present and contest evidence. A court, therefore, can convict and sentence a defendant without ever applying substantive criminal law requirements. The new sentencing reforms have not ad-dressed this systemic flaw. Thus, part V of this Article argues that the logic and effect of sentencing reform proposals require that the criminal law ...