This essay, written for the Wayne Law Review's 2014 Symposium on white collar crime and sentencing, examines the rising popularity of the “sophisticated means” enhancement under Section 2B1.1 of the United States Sentencing Guidelines. Over the past decade, the rate at which federal courts...

A deterrence model with comparative static analyses is used to study efficient sentences when trials are not immediate. Depending on relative costs and the disutility of jail and prison, as well as the foresight of potential criminals, efficient credit for presentence incarceration ranges from...

I am a law professor and a criminal defense lawyer, not a historian. It is with some trepidation that I stand before you to suggest that our very persistent regional sentencing variations have roots in the political struggles of Reformation England and the cultures of the subgroups that...

Section 102 of the Sentencing Act 2002 gives judges' only limited discretion when sentencing for stage-1 murder: the discretion to rebut the presumption of life imprisonment in circumstances where the sentence would otherwise be “manifestly unjust”. This is a high threshold, and the Court of...

This paper uses data from the Gothenburg District Court in Sweden and a research design that exploits the random assignment of politically appointed jurors (termed nämndemän) to make three contributions to the literature on jury decision-making: (i) an assessment of whether systematic biases...

Brazil has the third largest prison population worldwide-over 700,000 people. At least 28% of them are in prison for drug trafficking. Given that situation, this paper explores the conflicts among the law; the Supremo Tribunal Federal, or Brazilian Federal Supreme Court (STF) and lower court...