Harnessing Local Variations in Federal Sentencing to Increase the System's Moral Credibility

Adam Richardson, Florida Fourth District Court of Appeal

Abstract

This Essay attempts to provide an all-things-considered approach to justifying local sentencing variations in the federal system. Instead of trying to eliminate those disparities, this Essay contends that the federal sentencing system should embrace regional variations to increase the moral credibility of the system at the local level. To do this, it argues for the creation of regional sentencing commissions (one for each federal circuit), which would promulgate their own, regional sentencing guidelines. By premising each set of guidelines on Professor Paul H. Robinson’s distributive principle of empirical desert, which is informed by lay intuitions of justice, the federal system would be made to respond to community norms and conditions, thereby increasing local credibility.