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...
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