Sentencing Class @ OSU Moritz College of Law
A new home for an old class blog
recent posts
- Anyone have any distinct views on who Joe Biden should pick as US Attorney General?
- What data in the federal system would indicate the Biden Administration is drawing down the federal drug war?
- A final (too brief) foray into what metrics and data matter for assessing a sentencing system
- Reactions to our look behind the robes with federal sentencing judges?
- Are there any “offender characteristics” that you think must be considered at sentencing? If so, how?
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Category: Supreme Court rulings
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I found as a useful distraction the morning of 2020 Election Day listening to the oral argument in Jones v. Mississippi, 18-1259. All the Justices had lots of interesting and hard questions concerning the issue of whether the Eighth Amendment requires a sentencer to make a finding that a juvenile is permanently incorrigible before imposing a…
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To start the final week of October, we will turn to discuss the (insufficiently discussed) Supreme Court ruling in US v. Watts upholding the constitutionality of the use of so-called "acquitted conduct" in the calculation of the sentencing guidelines. I would like us in class (and here in the comments) to explore just what "acquitted…
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After a final review of what we should take away from the McClesky ruling and our discussion of a possible legislative response, we will turn for our last week of death penalty discussion to the Supreme Court's Eighth Amendment jurisprudence placing categorical limits on what crimes cannot result in a capital sentence and what criminals…
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As mentioned in class, mini-paper #3 provides you an opportunity to explore federal sentencing realities surrounding a federal defendant of your choice. In a series of posts, I will be providing a series of suggestions about possible federal defendants you might consider examining for mini-paper #3. In this post, for example, I thought it worth…
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are worth checking out if you are eager to think deeply about the future of Eighth Amendment limitations on extreme prison sentences. And here are links to the original SCOTUS slip opinions: Graham v. Florida (2010) (all 84-fun-loving-PDF-pages) Miller v. Alabama (2012) (all 62-fun-loving-PDF-pages)
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I hope everyone enjoyed yesterday's visit by Jonathan Wroblewski (and the Duke game) as much as I did. I am sorry we did not have more time in class for questions, but I plan to use the first part of Thursday's class to follow-up on his lecture and also on the second short-paper assignment. I…
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CLASS PLANS: Today and next Tuesday we will be discussing: (1) Tiernan & USSG 3E1.1 & Pepper and sentencing discounts for pleas and cooperation, (2) Problem 5-4 & Pepper and sentencing based on offender characteristics, and then (3) McMillan & Blakely & Problem 6-1 (in casebook). A timely and interesting circuit ruling that touches on…
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I made brief mention in class of Justice Stephen Breyer's concurrence in Watts, and I thought it might be useful to quote all of it here as the prelude to an (extra credit) challenge: I join the Court’s per curiam opinion while noting that it poses no obstacle to the Sentencing Commission itself deciding whether…
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I suggested in class some time ago that you should read (and re-read) Furman thinking about which of the nine Justices' opinions you would have been most likely to join (assuming you had been a hypothetical additional Justice in 1972 and could only join an opinion rather than write your own). Because I suspect we will not…
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We ended class with a question/issue/talking-point that may well haunt us throughout the semester and that has arguably haunted all modern legal debates over modern issues of crime and punishment: is "death" really different as a matter of constitutional law? Couple of preliminaries as we unpack this question/issue/talking-point going forward: 1. As a basic normative and empirical…
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can and should get started in the comments to this post. And, upon request (or based on my own assessment of which comments merit added attention), specific comments can and will be transposed into a new post (which in turn can and should enable continued and more focused commentary). Most essentially, everyone is urged to…
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As you may recall, we discussed the case and potential sentencing fate of "Tommy Johnson" in our first seminar session this semester. Today, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the real defendant, Curtis Johnson, on whom our case facts were based. I encourage everyone to read the (relatively short) SCOTUS ruling in Johnson, which is…
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As hinted in Wednesday’s class, I think the constitutional and social history surrounding the rulings in McGautha, Furman and Gregg are fascinating. Here are some links and thoughts for anyone interested in digging deeper in this little piece of important constitutional history: McGautha (1971) Here is a link to all the full opinons in McGautha. …
Sentencing Class @ OSU Moritz College of Law 