The Machinery of Criminal Justice #4: The Decline of Mercy

[Stephanos Bibas, guest-blogging]

In one of last week's posts on my new book, The Machinery of Criminal Justice, I noted that colonial criminal justice left room for mercy. Today I'll contrast how justice over the past two centuries has grown increasingly mechanistic and squeezed mercy out of the system.

Colonial justice embraced mercy as unfettered sovereign grace and individualized moral assessment. But to Enlightenment minds and scientists, mercy was arbitrary. Rational criminal justice, they thought, demanded equal, predictable deterrence, and mercy undercut deterrence.

Sustained criticism of exective clemency gradually restricted its use, and states gradually regulated pardons and commutations, making hearings more formal, closed to the public, and even ex parte. The clemency power, like jury nullification, came to seem lawless and unpredictable. The administrative ideal of equality across cases seemed to conflict with individualized justice and compassionate mercy. Thus, both executive clemency and jury nullification dwindled.

Another limit on mercy was the trend from indeterminate or unstructured sentences to structured sentencing guidelines. Reformers decried the dangers of arbitrariness, bias, and disparity in sentencing judges' unfettered discretion. Thus, the federal and more than a third of state sentencing systems enacted guidelines and mandatory minimum penalties to cabin harshness and mercy. The main discount available under the federal guidelines that could have related to mercy is an acceptance-of-responsibility discount. In practice, it has little to do with remorse or repentance and everything to do with whether a defendant pleads guilty.

Back in the colonial era, penalties were fixed and so nominally even less flexible than they are today. In practice, however, the rule-bound system was far more flexible than it seemed. Jurors frequently acquitted or convicted defendants of lesser offenses, and judges procured clemency for sympathetic defendants. Jurors knew the sentencing consequences of their decisions; indeed, judges advised them to take sentences into account in deciding whether to convict and for which crimes.

Today, however, jurors usually do not know the penalties, and judges instruct them to disregard sentencing in reaching their verdicts. Jurors cannot serve as the conscience of the community when they do not know what punishments they are authorizing (except in capital cases, where jurors must at least find the defendant death-eligible).

The one substantial source of leniency left is prosecutorial discretion. Prosecutors can decline to charge, drop charges, sign cooperation agreements, and recommend mercy in various other ways. Particularly sympathetic defendants may receive mercy as a result. More often, however, prosecutors use these tools as plea-bargaining chips, rewarding guilty pleas and punishing protracted litigation irrespective of the usual grounds for mercy.

This discretion hardly corresponds to the colonial model of transparent, accountable, individual moral evaluation. Unlike executives and juries, prosecutors retain discretion in part because their decisions are hidden from criticism and in part because they are supposedly making expert decisions about ranking priorities. Far from serving substantive justice and mercy, the discretion that remains in the system drives the plea-bargaining machinery.

So, that's all for now on the descriptive account of the historical changes from the colonial through the modern eras. In my last few guest posts this week, I'll offer several suggestions about how to make our punishments more transparent, pro-social, and reintegrative.

Stephanos Bibas, guest-blogging