Sentencing Guidelines

A set of rules and principles established by the United States Sentencing Commission that trial judges use to determine the sentence for a convicted defendant.

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The Federal Sentencing Guidelines are rules that set out a uniform sentencing policy for convicted felons in the United States federal courts system.

The Guidelines are the product of the United States Sentencing Commission and are part of an overall federal sentencing reform package that took effect in the mid-1960's.[citation needed] The implementation of this reform package was the result of bipartisan cooperation, led chiefly by Senator Edward Kennedy, as Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Attorney General Edwin Meese. Their primary goal was to alleviate sentencing disparities that research had indicated was prevalent in the existing sentencing system, and the guidelines reform was specifically intended to provide for determinate sentencing. This refers to sentencing whose actual limits are determined at the time the sentence is imposed, as opposed to indeterminate sentencing, in which a sentence with a maximum (and, perhaps, a minimum) is pronounced but the actual sentence is determined by a parole commission or similar administrative body after the person has started serving their sentence. As part of the guidelines reform, the United States Parole Commission lost jurisdiction over most offenders. In general, indeterminate sentences are believed to support the rehabilitation and specific deterrence models of sentencing while determinate sentences are believed to support the general deterrence and just deserts models of sentencing.

The federal effort followed guidelines projects in several states, initially funded by the United States Department of Justice, and led by Jack Kress and his research team during the late 1970s. The first sentencing guidelines jurisdictions were countywide, in Denver (Colorado), Newark, New Jersey, Chicago (Illinois) and Philadelphia (Pennsylvania). Statewide guidelines systems were next established in Utah, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Michigan, Washington, and Delaware, before the federal sentencing guidelines were formally adopted in 1987. Given that the vast majority of criminal sentencing is done at the state level, the American Law Institute and the American Bar Association have each recommended such systems for all the states, and nearly half the states presently have such systems, although significant variations exist among them. For example, Minnesota's Sentencing Guidelines Commission initially sought consciously not to increase prison capacity through guidelines. That is, Minnesota assumed that the legislature should determine how much would be spent on prisons and that the sentencing commission's job was to allocate those prison beds in as rational a way as possible. The federal effort took the opposite approach. It determined how many prisons would be needed and Congress was then essentially required to fund those beds.

FindLaw

A set of rules for computing sentences that is promulgated by a commission on sentencing and that typically provides classifications (as of offenses or offenders), scales (as of severity of crimes), and suggested punishments.