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eBook details

• Title: Introducing the "Heartland Departure" (Suggested Paradigm for Federal Sentencing Guidelines)
• Author : Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy
• Release Date : January 22, 2004
• Genre: Law,Books,Professional & Technical,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 372 KB

Description

Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (the "Guidelines"), sentencing decisions have often been comprised of "more complication of detail than richness of concept." (1) This Article proposes one means--the "heartland departure"--by which federal sentencing procedure may be able to gain the conceptual depth and purpose it currently lacks. Prior to the advent of the Guidelines, sentencing decisions were primarily the product of unfettered judicial discretion; no rules, principles, precedent, or purposes guided or controlled district court judges in their determination of particular sentences to impose. The exercise of this discretion resulted in unjustifiable disparities in sentencing among similarly-situated defendants. As such, pre-Guidelines jurisprudence could be characterized as "lawless" in that sentences were primarily the product of individual judges' subjective predilections. Furthermore, in the absence of meaningful appellate review of such sentencing determinations, district court judges rarely, if ever, wrote reasoned sentencing decisions justifying the imposition of a given sentence in light of the purposes of criminal punishment. As such, the system was also purposeless, lacking the essential foundations for a doctrinally-rich common law of sentencing.

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