A Comparative Perspective on the Sentencing Chaos in the U.S.

William T. Pizzi

doi:10.2202/1535-167X.1174

As the result of a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions over the last several years, the U.S. has entered a period of chaos sentencing in criminal cases. For nearly twenty years, reformers of sentencing had tried to get states to adopt a sentencing guidelines model that helped structure sentencing decisions and that protected defendants from the sort of arbitrary sentencing power that was possible in many U.S. jurisdictions where judges were given broad sentencing discretion with few limits on their power. The Court's recent decisions, however, have dealt a major blow to sentencing guidelines and the result is uncertainty over issues even as basic as who should sentence – the judge or a jury.This Article explains how sentencing works in the U.S. and then analyses the recent Supreme Court decisions that have had the rather disturbing consequence of favoring those jurisdictions that leave sentencing within the broad discretion of the trial judge with no significant limits on that power.In the last section of the Article, the author shows that the intellectual confusion that plagues sentencing in the U.S. stems from the fact that the U.S. has difficulty recognizing that sentencing in the U.S. has traditionally been built on a model that is strongly inquisitorial, vesting tremendous power in the trial judge. This model does not integrate well with a trial system which is at the same time extremely adversarial. The Article concludes that any reform of sentencing that fails to understand the clash of values between a trial system that puts tremendous power in the hands of the parties and a sentencing system that puts similar power in the hands of a single judge is likely to be ineffective and counterproductive.

A Comparative Perspective on the Sentencing Chaos in the U.S.

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