Sentencing Posts
Law360 Article on Defining SCOTUS Juvenile Justice Cases
The article “Justices Put Juvenile Sentencing Back On The Front Burner” from Law360 discusses the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case Jones v. Mississippi.
Judges’ Insight into the Task of Sentencing
Members of the judiciary recently shared their thoughts on the challenge of sentencing in an article for The National Law Journal.
Federal Criminal Risk Assessment
Risk assessments are a common feature of federal decisionmaking across a wide variety of areas of regulation. Perhaps the most widely used definition describes risk assessment as “the process of using risk factors to estimate the likelihood (i.e., probability) of an outcome occurring in a population.”
Juvenile or Adult? California Bill Would Raise Age for Prosecution from 18 to 20
A California lawmaker argues that 18- and 19-year-olds aren’t mature enough to do prison time if they break the law, and so she has submitted a bill that would treat them like juveniles.
Making Drunk Sex a Crime: Why a New Push to ‘Close a Loophole’ Would Actually Establish a Troubling New Legal Regime
As part of this year’s state of the state agenda, Gov. Cuomo announced sweeping changes to the criminal laws governing intoxicated sex. He has not characterized these reforms as radical but as merely “closing a loophole” in the rape laws, to make it so that not only involuntarily but voluntarily intoxicated people are unable to consent to sexual activity.
Model law proposes automatic expungement of non-conviction records
In recent decades, criminal records have become widely available as a result of digitized records systems and a new commerce in background screening and data aggregation.
How Long Is A Life Sentence? For Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court, A Philosophical Quandary.
What’s the meaning of “life?”. Pennsylvania’s highest court considers the question currently facing many other courts around the country of how many years in prison constitute a life sentence, and how can such a thing be calculated?
Risk and Resources: A Qualitative Perspective on Low-Level Sentencing in Virginia
Virginia’s sentencing guidelines include alternative sanctions based on the use of a quantitative instrument called the Nonviolent Risk Assessment (NVRA) that identifies individuals convicted of drug and property crimes that are considered to be at lower risk of recidivism. In this study, the authors explore how judges make use of the NVRA instrument when sentencing individuals convicted of low‐level drug and property crimes.
How Do Prosecutors (and the Rest of Us) Get Sentencing So Wrong?
This article is a response to a recent New York Times op ed piece in which James Forman, Jr. and Sarah Lustbader pose the question, “What can we do to shrink our prison population, the world’s largest?”.
Law360 Article Argues In Favor of Risk Assessment Tools
An article for Law360 entitled “Risk Assessment Tools Are Not A Failed ‘Minority Report’” discusses the use of risk assessment tools used by judges in criminal cases. The article comes in response to a New York Times op-ed which implied that risk assessment tools make future violence seem more predictable than it actually is.