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Great new article "celebrating" a quarter century of federal sentencing under the SRA

By Douglas A. Berman

Inspired in part by my recent (serious!?!) post suggesting we ought to consider how IBM's Watson computer could aid sentencing decision-making, a couple of helpful readers pointed out this new article by J.C. Oleson in the University of Richmond Law Review titled "Blowing Out All the Candles: A Few Thoughts on the Twenty-Fifth Birthday of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984."  There are many aspect of this piece that make in a must-read this long weekend (even though there is something a bit mathematically peculiar about celebrating the 25th birthday of the SRA in 2011).  In light of my Watson post, I especially liked the passage spotlighting that "sociologist Max Weber imagined a kind of sentencing computer that would collect relevant facts and dispense a just sentence," and that "Marvin Frankel, the patron saint of sentencing guidelines, acknowledged that computers could be useful in bringing parity and fairness to sentencing...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on February 19, 2011 (boomark / email).