Description

When judges confront convicted white-collar criminals, their sentencing world becomes particularly complicated. The cases are enormously heterogeneous. It is harder to speak of a typical bribery or securities fraud than a typical drug deal or mail theft. And in white-collar cases, far ore often than in common crimes, matters of intent and motivation are often ambiguous. Sitting in Judgement provides the first book-length study of the beliefs and practices of federal judges as they go about the task of sentencing white-collar criminals. Working from lengthy, in-depth interviews with fifty-one judges in seven federal districts, the book explores such topics as the information available to sentencing judges and how they work with it; the principles of harm, blameworthiness, and consequence that affect judges' decisions; and the conceptual problems that make it difficult to convert a basic agreement on principle into a system of consistent sentences.