From: Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com>
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 01:33:16 -0800 (PST)
To: Black Unicorn <unicorn@schloss.li>
Subject: Re: If guilty of a lesser crime, you can be sentenced for a greater
Message-ID: <3.0.32.19970110011150.00757b38@mail.io.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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At 06:04 PM 1/9/97 -0500, Black Unicorn wrote:

>Go out to a law book store and take a look at the guideline book.  It's
>actually a lot of fun.  "Ok, say I killed my wife for her coke stash and
>recruited my brother to dump the body..."

The US Sentencing Commission and the guidelines are on the Web - see
<http://www.ussc.gov> for general Commission stuff, and
<http://www.ussc.gov/guide/guidetab.htm> for the 1995 manual (there have
been amendments, but this ought to be good enough for just goofing off).

I haven't seen the recent Supreme Court decision yet, but from the
description it sounds like they haven't done anything more than affirm what
the federal courts have been doing for some time now. In general, crimes or
bad acts which are used at sentencing must only be proved to a
preponderance standard, and the judge is the trier of fact. The use of
uncharged bad acts evidence is old news.

I wish I had some hope that recent trends eroding away vital constitutional
rights would be reversed - but being tough-on-crime is very popular. What
are we going to do when we no longer have even two useful Constitutional
rights to rub together? 
--
Greg Broiles                | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell:
gbroiles@netbox.com         | 
http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto.
                            |