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The 'Liberation' of Federal Judges' Discretion in the Wake of the Booker/Fanfan Decision: Is There Increased Disparity and Divergence Between Courts?
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In this article, the impact of the Booker/Fanfan decisions on interjurisdictional variation and sentencing disparity is examined, and it is shown that allowing judges greater freedom to exercise substantive rationality does not necessarily result in increased extralegal disparity.Abstract:
The United States Sentencing Guidelines are among the most ambitious attempts in history to control sentencing discretion. However, a major sea change occurred in January of 2005, when the U.S Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Booker and Fanfan that in order to be constitutional, the federal guidelines must be advisory rather than presumptive. The impact of the Booker/Fanfan decisions on interjurisdictional variation and sentencing disparity is an opportunity to examine the issue of whether the increased opportunity to sentence according to substantively rational criteria entails increased extralegal disparity. We draw on a conceptualization of courts as communities and a focal concerns model of sentencing decisions to frame expectations about federal sentencing in the wake of Booker/Fanfan. We test these expectations using USSC data on federal sentencing outcomes from four time periods: prior to the 2003 PROTECT Act, the period governed by the PROTECT Act, post-Booker/Fanfan, and post-Gall v U.S. In general, we find that extralegal disparity and between-district variation in the effects of extralegal factors on sentencing have not increased post-Booker and Gall. We conclude that allowing judges greater freedom to exercise substantive rationality does not necessarily result in increased extralegal disparity.read more
Citations
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The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)
Paul DiMaggio,Walter W. Powell +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them, and describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative.
Law That Does Not Fit Society: Sentencing Guidelines as a Neo-Classical Reaction to the Dilemmas of Substantivized Law
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that societal conditions that caused substantivation hamper reformalization in the political process; organizational and occupational consequences of substantivation also impede political and implementation chances of neoclassical instruments; and impediments to reformalisation derive from the method of central guidance used to reestablish sociologically formal rationality.
Journal ArticleDOI
Taming the System: The Control of Discretion in Criminal Justice, 1930–1990. By Samuel Walker. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. x, 191 pp. $32.50, ISBN 0-19-507820-9.)
Journal ArticleDOI
Disproportional Imprisonment of Black and Hispanic Males: Sentencing Discretion, Processing Outcomes, and Policy Structures
TL;DR: This article investigated the extent to which the disproportional punishment of black and Hispanic men, and local variation in such disproportionality, can be attributed to unexplained disparities in local sentencing decisions, as opposed to the extent of which such differences are mediated by sentencing policies, or case-processing and extralegal factors.
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Focally Concerned About Focal Concerns: A Conceptual and Methodological Critique of Sentencing Disparities Research
TL;DR: In this article, the authors proposed a theoretical framework for explaining disparities in sentencing outcomes, which is the predominant theoretical framework in criminology for explain disparities in criminal justice outcomes. But, while the framework has generated a large body of empirical scholarship,
References
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Book ChapterDOI
The iron cage revisited institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields
Paul DiMaggio,Walter W. Powell +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them, and describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative.
Book
Hierarchical Linear Models: Applications and Data Analysis Methods
TL;DR: The Logic of Hierarchical Linear Models (LMLM) as discussed by the authors is a general framework for estimating and hypothesis testing for hierarchical linear models, and it has been used in many applications.
Posted Content
The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields
Paul DiMaggio,Walter W. Powell +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore why organizations tend to be increasingly and inevitably homogeneous in their forms and practices, and suggest that organizational fields are structured into an organizational field by powerful forces that lead them to become similar.
Book
Institutions and Organizations: Ideas and Interests
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present an analytical framework of three Pillars of Institutions: defining institutions, defining institutions and defining institutions' legitimacy and legitimacy, as well as three assumptions associated with these Pillars: Content, Agency, Carriers and Levels.
Journal ArticleDOI
Using the correct statistical test for the equality of regression coefficients
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors point out that one of these estimators is correct while the other is incorrect, which biases one's hypothesis test in favor of rejecting the null hypothesis that b1= b2.