Criminal Justice Ethics articles from January 1994

Criminal Justice Ethics archives from January 1994

Secondary smoke surrounds the capital punishment debate.
January 1, 1994... Arguing the morality of the death penalty would be like attacking the morality of smoking twenty years ago. At that time, it would have been fruitless to propose a ban on smoking on the grounds it was immoral. While people sensed that...

Justifying the grounds of mitigation. (Symposium on Sentencing Guidelines and Guidance)
January 1, 1994... Questions of mitigation arise whenever the sentence has to be kept in proportion to the seriousness of the offense. Thus, mitigation as such is unlikely to be of great concern to rehabilitationists, except insofar as they observe a...

Purposes of punishment under the Minnesota sentencing guidelines. (Symposium on Sentencing Guidelines and Guidance)
January 1, 1994... The Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission adopted "Just Deserts" as its primary punishment theory. Since the Guidelines became effective, in 1980, the role of crime-control-oriented and other non-retributive purposes has grown. But the...

The role of criminal record in the federal sentencing guidelines. (Symposium on Sentencing Guidelines and Guidance)
January 1, 1994... Most criminal justice systems accord a central role to an offender's criminal history in the determination of sentence, although the importance of previous convictions varies across jurisdictions. In countries such as Canada, Australia, England...

Degrees of freedom. (Symposium on Sentencing Guidelines and Guidance)
January 1, 1994... One cannot think of challenging the central place of imprisonment in modern systems of punishment without changing the penal system as a whole. This claim underlies the thinking behind a large part of the move towards the introduction of...

Sentencing guidelines and penal aims in Minnesota. (Symposium on Sentencing Guidelines and Guidance)
January 1, 1994... Richard Frase's essay (in this volume)(1) on Minnesota's guidelines raises the question of how the aims of a sentencing guidelines system can be assessed. In earlier writings, I have described the Minnesota guidelines as influenced principally...

Sentencing guidelines: the problem of conditional sentences. (Symposium on Sentencing Guidelines and Guidance)
January 1, 1994... In recent years there has been considerable interest in the rationale underlying custodial, community and financial sentencing, and a resurgence in the importance of desert principles.(1) Standard forms of sentence involve the imposition by the...

Amendments in the route to sentencing reform. (Symposium on Sentencing Guidelines and Guidance)
January 1, 1994... The future of sentencing reform appears to rest for now in the hands of permanent sentencing commissions. These commissions have appeared during the last fifteen years, in a sizeable group of states enacting comprehensive changes to their...

Life Before Birth: The Moral and Legal Status of Embryos and Fetuses.
January 1, 1994... Consider the standard defense of abortion rights. All persons have the right to determine what goes on in their bodies. Therefore, every woman has the right to determine what goes on in her body. Because the decision to have an abortion is a...