Defendants are regularly condemned to years, decades, or life in prison for minor infractions because of minimum sentencing statutes. If judges had more discretion in sentencing, then sentences could be more proportional to the crime, more specific to the individual defendant, and minimize the negative impact of minimum sentencing laws without inherently needing those laws repealed.
“A study by professors Christian Dippel of UCLA and Michael Poyker of Columbia University examined sentencing decisions in 10 state court systems from 1980 to 2018. North Carolina was one of three states where they found a statistically significant relationship between judicial elections and longer sentences.“
Facing South
July 31, 2019
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