Precedent-Setting Court Cases Support Response. •WHAT Factors Essay

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precedent-setting court cases support response. •What factors affect sentencing? Describe sides debate sentencing guidelines. Evaluate factors affect sentencing compare factors racial, gender, socioeconomic lines.

It is a rather well-known fact that there have been numerous cases in the history of the judicial system in which sentencing was considered to be unfair and dependent of racial, gender, or social factors. The role of the Sentencing guidelines was precisely to avoid arbitrary sentencing. However, there are strong debates concerning the applicability of these guidelines and abuses that surround them.

In general terms, the two elements that affect and determine sentencing are the level of the offence and the criminal history of the defendant (United States Sentencing Commission, 2012) These two elements interact and according to the Sentencing table determine the months to be spent in jail to serve a legal punishment. However, as legal practice improved and more and more cases of abuses surfaced, the Sentencing Guidelines were viewed as denying a defendant the right to a trial by a jury. In this sense, "In a two-part decision on January 12, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the current federal sentencing system violates a defendant's right to trial by jury, while at the same time directing federal judges to "take [federal guidelines] into account" when imposing sentences.

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Under the ruling, federal judges will have the discretion to decide whether to impose a sentence either harsher or more lenient than the guidelines' ranges, but may be subject to reversal if an appeals court determines the sentence to be "unreasonable." (The Leadership Conference, 2005) Therefore, the approval that the Guidelines could be set aside in a judge's decision over a sentencing would somewhat make the Guidelines to have mere informatory purposes.

In addition, if the sentencing can be done at the federal level, it automatically implies that the rules of one state can either benefit or harm a defendant, depending on the state under which he or she is trialed and sentenced. From this point-of-view, the place of the trial is in this sense extremely important to consider the place of the trial. This is also due to the fact that certain states view more favorably specific offenses or criminal conduct.

The arbitrary conduct of judges in relation to the Sentencing Guidelines has led to severe discriminatory sentencing which takes into account racial, gender, or social conditions. These….....

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