Making Sentencing Sensible

This Term, Cunningham v. California offers the Supreme Court a rare opportunity to bring order to its confusing, incoherent, formalistic body of sentencing law. Sentencing law must accommodate many structural and individual constitutional interests: federalism, the separation of powers, democratic experimentation, individualization, consistency, efficiency, and procedural fairness and notice. The Court, however, has lurched from under- to over-regulation without carefully weighing competing principles and tradeoffs. A nuanced, modern sentencing jurisprudence would emphasize that a trial is a backward-looking, offense-oriented event well suited for a lay jury. Sentencing, in contrast, includes forward-looking, offender-oriented assessments and calls upon an expert, repeat-player judge to exercise reasoned judgment. Juries should find offense facts, but judges may find offender facts and also exercise judgment at sentencing. Within these bounds, the Court should preserve states’ flexibility to experiment with different roles for juries, judges, legislatures, sentencing commissions, probation and parole officers, and trial and appellate courts. In particular, while certain types of mandatory guidelines are unconstitutional, voluntary or even presumptive guidelines should be permissible so long as appellate courts meaningfully review sentencing judges’ reasons for imposing sentences within and outside ranges. This modest approach, which preserves room for experimentation, fits best with legal-process values and is least likely to provoke evasion