Court Opinion

ID: 9522631
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 02:29:48.484368+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:03:24.864770
License: Public Domain

Mr. JUSTICE STOUDER, specially concurring: I concur with my colleagues but I do so because neither the statutes nor the precedents provide any standards or guidelines delineating what is or is not an excessive sentence either as imposed by the trial court or as reviewed by an appellate court. It seems to me that proper sentencing includes the requirement that sentences be meaningful and substantially uniform. However, the current trend seems to be that where the crime is serious, and there can be no question that the crime and conduct of the defendant in this case are serious, any sentence may be imposed by the trial court because no standards have been evolved against which the discretion of the trial judge can be measured. Under the rule of judicial discretion in sentencing it might well have been that the defendant could have been sentenced to various terms ranging from not less than 25 years but not more than 75 years, or a sentence of not less than 200 years imprisonment but not more than 600 years or perhaps a sentence of not less than 800 years but not more than 1,500 years imprisonment. There is apparently no standard which would provide that any of the foregoing sentences would be inappropriate or an abuse of discretion. It is obvious that with such a wide range of potential sentences there can be no uniformity in sentencing. Likewise, sentences which involve big numbers of years are not meaningful except in some abstract or intangible way. A sentence which in its minimum or maximum exceeds life expectancy of a person, while it might demonstrate that the judge believes the crime to be serious, is obviously not related to reality and on its face demonstrates no expectation that the sentence can be complied with. Such a sentence must be regarded at best as a legal fiction in an area where legal fiction seems to me inappropriate. I think that large unrealistic sentences also have another serious deficiency, that is, they tend to deprecate lesser sentences and offer an inappropriate standard of comparison when sentences for less serious offenses are considered. On a scale of seriousness a sentence of 100 years would imply that it represents an offense 20 times more serious than an offense for which a 5-year minimum prison term is meted out and yet I have some doubt that any such relationship between such offenses can be established. In fact we have here an example of the Aunt Jane remedy. If one spoonful of medicine is good, two spoonfuls ought to be much better. Likewise if a sentence of 25 years imprisonment is good, a sentence of 50 years ought to be twice as good. My plea is for rationality not leniency. It does little good to talk about judicial discretion in an area where there are no standards.