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Serving People from Arrest to Reintegration

ABA Commission on Effective Criminal Sanctions: Roundtable on “Second Look” Sentencing Reforms

  • Organization: American Bar Association
  • Document Type: Article/News
  • Date Created: Monday, December 08, 2008
  • Submitted: Thursday, June 04, 2009
  • Attachment(s): PDF

A follow-up to Justice Kennedy's comission, this collection of 10 papers addresses various sentencing reforms. The papers fall into three main categories:

1. Executive clemency: these papers speak to the viability of the pardon process in the current sentncing system dominated by administrative law concepts, and in the current political climate.

2. Statutory "second look" mechanisms: these papers address determinate sentencing framework, and discuss the revised Model Penal
Code/Sentencing draft, and other proposals to engraft more regularly available early release functions onto a determinate sentencing system. Further, they discuss the
authority in existing law by which federal prison authorities may ask the sentencing court to reduce a term of imprisonment for "extraordinary and compelling reasons."
3. The usefulness of special sentence reduction mechanisms to
achieve appropriate back-end relief.

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