Sentencing

Sentencing

Introduction

In common law's system, a defendant is sentenced after proving him or her guilty of committing a crime. On the other hand, in civil law, the sentencing phase and system of a sentence may take place at the same time. In common law, the outcomes of a guilty plea to trial verdict may lead to sentencing. As for minor and insignificant offences, the punishment is given immediately after the conviction; whereas, in more severe and complex cases a judge usually sets a date for sentencing. As per the spirit of the law sentencing tends to be the final act of the judge which also tends to serve his or her job description. Sentencing is also the final stage of the whole judicial process which can involve a verdict either in favor of the defendant or against the defendant. However, there are various others factors which tend to be discussed in the context of this paper relating to the ideas of sentencing.

Discussion

Proportionality

A person tends to be convicted for a crime he or she tends to commit and based on that the punishment is served to him or her. This is the basic idea related to proportionality in terms of criminal sentencing. The idea of proportionality in terms of criminal sentencing further tends to shed light on the punishments which appear to be appropriate to the crime. For example a person tends who tends to commit the crime of breaking a signal cannot be served with the punishment of relatively higher decree. However, many experts tend to believe that there should be a demarcation when following this principle. This idea of proportionality tends to serve the punishment which tends to justify the crime by inculcating different other factors when making a judgment. Precisely, the idea of proportionality is all about the fact that severe crimes must have severe punishments and vice versa. However, the principle of proportionality as per the moment tends to appear unclear in regard of the nature of the cases. The principle of proportionality tends to stand rather clearly in the capital cases which demands severe punishments such as death penalty. However, it also demands that before serving such a punishment all other peripheral factors must be analyzed clearly (Lovegrove, 2010). The principle of proportionality tends to be unclear when it comes to non-capital cases. However, there is a greater need of improving the mechanism where the principle of proportionality can be appropriately applied.

Death Penalty

Death Penalty serves to be an extremely controversial issue with different people having different opinion on it. The future of death penalty is not too bright; however, there are fractions in the society who tends to support it. This issue has been the source of debate among the entire nation and has divided the nation on it. Since death penalty tends to extract its roots from the times where the human rights ceased to exist therefore in today world it tends o face a lot of criticism. However there are exceptions in regard to death penalty, ...