Judicial discretion in legal decision-making

Judges have been granted in recent decades the ability to use discretionary power in the matter of sentencing, regardless of the Guidelines for Sentencing that have become nowadays more and more mere guidelines subject to overruling by federal judges. However, given the abuses that have been registered at this part of the legal process, the legislative branch has taken part of the responsibility and started actions that would somewhat limit the discretionary methodology used by judges in sentencing. Taking into account the fact that there is a wide discrepancy across states in terms of punishments applied for the same criminal act depending on the state, the approach taken by the legislative branch to push forward new means of limiting the authority of the judges in terms of sentencing can be seen as a solution to avoiding discretionary actions and sentencing.

Among practitioners, this discretionary power of the judges is rather well-known and has been the subject of debate for an important part of the 20th century. In this sense, "every time a lawyer in his practice comes across an instance in which customs or legislation leaves anything to the discretion of the court, he is confronted with two series of dicta (…) First, there is that group which decries discretion as the rule of tyranny (…) on the other hand there are pronouncements not to be neglected to the effect that discretion involves the very opposite of rule" (Isaacs, 1923) This only draws the attention that indeed there was and is a significant issue related to the way in which judges use their power to sentence differently in different states. Moreover, "Some social scientists found that that federal sentence disparity prior to reforms of the 1980s was linked to extralegal variables such as the defendant's race/ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status" (Albonetti, 2011)

The reforms that have been undergone by the Congress since the early 1980s have aimed at providing clear guidelines related to the way in which sentencing could be done and at the same time limit the discretionary power of the court. Indeed the judge is the supreme authority in a court of law, despite the fact that it has no authority over the verdict of the Jury. Yet, the sentencing process up until the 1980s largely depended on the way in which the judge used his or hers best judgment in determining the gravity of an offense. This consideration led to a considerable number of abuses throughout the states particularly because the state laws were different from one place to another. Therefore, traditionally, a state where drug usage is a more severe problem, such as Nevada or Florida, the sentencing for drug trafficking would be more severe than in states where this phenomenon is not that spread out. In order to tackle this issue, the Congress set specific boundaries and minimum levels of sentencing that would allow judges throughout the country to have a common reference point when beginning to deliberate on a sentence.