Why March To A Uniform Beat? Adding Honesty and Proportionality to the Tune of Federal Sentencing

Authors

Jelani Jefferson Exum, St. John's University School of LawFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Texas Journal on Civil Liberties & Civil Rights

Publication Date

2010

Volume

15

First Page

142

Abstract

(Excerpt)

This Article fills a gap in current scholarship concerning the Federal Sentencing Guidelines ("Guidelines") by bringing together many sentencing concerns and refocusing them on the Guidelines themselves. Since United States v. Booker, in which the Supreme Court demoted the Guidelines from mandatory to advisory status and imposed reasonableness as the appellate standard of review, several scholars have written about the new, advisory Guidelines scheme. Some have focused on the constitutional problems that Booker failed to settle. Others have argued against a presumption of reasonableness for within-Guidelines sentences. For some scholars, the biggest issues with the advisory Guidelines regime are the lack of any guiding punishment policy for sentencing courts, and the lack of emphasis on district courts' reasons for imposing a sentence. While this Article draws on some of the ideas presented in prior scholarship, its main objective is to bring all of these concerns together by focusing on problems within the Guidelines, advisory or not.

Comments

Available at: https://sites.utexas.edu/tjclcr/archives/volume-15/