What are the Sentencing Guidelines, and how do they relate to mandatory minumum sentences?
For many years in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, many people who looked at the justice system were concerned that different federal judges gave very different sentences to people who committed very similar crimes. This might be because the judges were in different parts of the country, or because they had very different theories about just punishment. In some cases, the differences may have been a result of racial prejudice or favoritism. After many years of debate, Congress in 1984 created a commission to create a system of sentencing that would be applied the same way by federal judges around the country. Crimes would be analyzed, and depending upon specified criteria (for example, the defendant carried a gun during a crime, but didn’t fire it at any one), a guideline for an appropriate sentence would be created. Judges would have to determine the facts of the case, and the facts about the offender, including the offender’s history of prior offenses, and find the appropriate guideline rang
