Exam 7: Sentencing and Punishment

You have graduated from law school, passed the bar, and opened your own law firm. The first phone call to your office comes from a mother begging you to handle an appeal for her son, who has been sentenced to life in prison under a "three strikes and you're out law." This law mandates a life sentence for any three criminal convictions. Your state has no death penalty, so this is the worst sentence that he can receive. You agree to hear the case and the mother says she will be there in ten minutes to hand you the file. You decide to use the ten minutes before her arrival researching Supreme Court case law in "three strikes" cases; in the process you envision possibilities of what this client might have done. -You next wonder if the client has committed three violent felonies. Perhaps his last crime involved an armed robbery and kidnapping. If this were the case:

Which of the following elements are typically addressed in a presentence report?

Today the chief focus of criminal punishment appears to be to prevent offenders from committing further criminal acts, also termed ____________________.

Completion: -A judge who grants _______________ in lieu of a prison sentence may impose conditions that limit a probationer's First Amendment rights provided the conditions bear a reasonable relationship to the probationer's rehabilitation.

In the summer after your first year at law school, you begin an internship at a Texas law firm called "Execution Stoppers." As you discerned from their name, they specialize in keeping accused criminals off death row. On your first day at the firm, they ask you to write a memo summarizing their three easiest cases of the month. Case 1 involves a 17 year-old boy who is accused of felony murder, a capital offense in that state. Case 2 involves an accused murdered whose IQ score is 62. Case 3 involves an individual who raped and murdered a child. Answer the following questions about the report you will craft to summarize these cases. -Assume that the state of Texas has established a standard that defines mental retardation as having an IQ score below 70. Based on this information, the client in Case 2:

According to the authors of this text, academicians who study capital punishment are nearly unanimous in believing that the death penalty is a general deterrent to murder.

In the summer after your first year at law school, you begin an internship at a Texas law firm called "Execution Stoppers." As you discerned from their name, they specialize in keeping accused criminals off death row. On your first day at the firm, they ask you to write a memo summarizing their three easiest cases of the month. Case 1 involves a 17 year-old boy who is accused of felony murder, a capital offense in that state. Case 2 involves an accused murdered whose IQ score is 62. Case 3 involves an individual who raped and murdered a child. Answer the following questions about the report you will craft to summarize these cases. -For the client in Case 3, the rape of a child is likely to be considered which of the following:

"When one man strikes another and kills him, he shall be put to death.... When one man injures and disfigures his fellow-countryman, it shall be done to him as he has done, eye for eye, tooth for tooth...." This is the Biblical statement of the doctrine of _________.

The trend in sentencing today is toward indeterminate sentences for adult offenders.

In Furman v. Georgia (1972) the Supreme Court declared Georgia's death penalty law unconstitutional.

Courts have held that conditions of probation may infringe a probationer's constitutional rights, including the First Amendment rights of free speech and association.

The Supreme Court has said that the Eighth Amendment must draw its meaning from evolving standards of decency.

The Supreme Court has held that the Eighth Amendment bars the execution of a person who was under the age of legal majority at the time of the crime.

A defendant convicted of multiple crimes must be given separate sentences for each offense.

Which of the following approaches to sentencing represents an effort to reduce sentencing disparities?

Completion: -Courts increasingly impose community control, also called ______________, where an offender is allowed to leave home only for employment and approved community service activities.

Completion: -During the 19th century reformers introduced the concept of the penitentiary, an idea that gave rise to the notion that through _______________ the criminal justice system could reform criminals.

You are defending a client accused of committing a hate crime. Apparently, he got into a bar fight and uttered a racial slur during the altercation. The man he punched was in fact an African-American. Sadly, the man your client punched ended up dying from head injuries caused by the punch. Assume that your client is found guilty of manslaughter, and answer the following questions about what happens next. -Let's say the crime took place on a Native American reservation and we find ourselves in federal court instead of state court. According to the decision in Booker v. United States, which of the following are criteria that the judge can properly consider in determining a sentence?

You are defending a client accused of committing a hate crime. Apparently, he got into a bar fight and uttered a racial slur during the altercation. The man he punched was in fact an African-American. Sadly, the man your client punched ended up dying from head injuries caused by the punch. Assume that your client is found guilty of manslaughter, and answer the following questions about what happens next. -Let's say that as a result of evidence showing premeditation your client was found guilty of first-degree murder instead of manslaughter. This happens in state court in a state where the death penalty could apply. Which of the following is true?

In the summer after your first year at law school, you begin an internship at a Texas law firm called "Execution Stoppers." As you discerned from their name, they specialize in keeping accused criminals off death row. On your first day at the firm, they ask you to write a memo summarizing their three easiest cases of the month. Case 1 involves a 17 year-old boy who is accused of felony murder, a capital offense in that state. Case 2 involves an accused murdered whose IQ score is 62. Case 3 involves an individual who raped and murdered a child. Answer the following questions about the report you will craft to summarize these cases. -As per the Supreme Court's rulings in Kennedy v. Louisiana and Comstock v. United States had the client in Case 3 committed a child rape, but no murder, he would: