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Questioning Blackmun's Thesis: Does Uniformity in Sentencing Entail Unfairness?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Ben Grunwald
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Abstract

It is commonly believed among criminal justice scholars that sentencing guidelines increase uniformity in sentencing at the cost of fairness. They reason that guideline systems rarely take all relevant case characteristics into consideration, and as a result, impose sentences in particular cases that are biased relative to the ideal or best sentence. This bias effect is one of the primary theoretical and practical challenges faced by courts and sentencing commissions in the last 30 years, and provides one of the strongest arguments against mandatory sentencing guidelines. This article identifies a second effect of guidelines on fairness, which has not been sufficiently acknowledged by the scholarly literature: the variance effect increases the fairness of sentences directly by increasing uniformity. This article uses statistical simulation to examine the relationship between the variance effect and the bias effect. The results provide substantial evidence that the variance effect is comparatively large, and that it may often outweigh the negative effects of bias. Under these conditions, sentencing guidelines will both increase uniformity and increase fairness.

Type
Penal Law & Society
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 499 - 534
Copyright
© 2015 Law and Society Association.

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