Form, function and finality of sentences through history: the Founding Era

As explained here, I am "celebrating" the official publication of my new article titled "Re-Balancing Fitness, Fairness, and Finality for Sentences" (which is available in full via this SSRN link) through a series of posts exploring sentence finality doctrines and practice.  As explained in this prior post, a central theme of my piece is that different conceptual, policy, and practical considerations are implicated when a defendant seeks only review and reconsideration of his final sentence and does not challenge his underlying conviction.  

This theme is developed descriptively in the first part of my article as I showcase (perhaps too briefly) how the forms and functions of different punishment systems throughout US history provide different frameworks for the legal and practical relationship between conviction finality and sentence finality.  I recount this historical story (too quickly) in three parts in my paper — discussing separately the Founding, Rehabilitative and Modern Eras — and will use three blog posts to set out this story here.  Starting with the Founding Era, here are some of my article's observations:

The distinct nature of sentencing and punishment in the Founding Era adds additional dimensions to the finality story in early American criminal justice systems.  At America’s founding, differentiating between convictions and sentences was largely unknown because a defendant’s conviction and sentence were generally one and the same. As the Supreme Court has explained, during this period the “substantive criminal law tended to be sanction-specific; it prescribed a particular sentence for each offense [and a] judge was meant simply to impose that sentence.”  This era’s “invariable linkage of punishment with crime” meant that there were generally no special sentencing doctrines or court proceedings distinct from the doctrines and procedures that attended traditional criminal trials. The early history of American law, in other words, did not generally distinguish between convictions and sentences for any purpose, let alone with respect to how these two components of a criminal judgment ought to be treated for finality purposes.

[In addition,] until the development of penitentiaries in the mid-nineteenth century, the capital and corporal punishments typically employed in early America were completed upon imposition and thus beyond review or reconsideration once imposed.  After a convicted criminal defendant was executed or banished or pilloried or whipped or placed in the public stocks, there were no practical means or opportunity to review or modify the imposed sanction.  An executed or banished defendant was, obviously, no longer present in the community to seek reconsideration of either his conviction or sentence; a defendant who was whipped or subject to other public corporal punishment could not have reversed or modified the pain or shame he experienced after such a sanction was first imposed.

Prior posts in this series:

• Examining "sentence finality" at length in new article and series of posts
• Finality foundations: is it uncontroversial that "conviction finality" and "sentence finality" raise distinct issues?
• Is it fair to read the Constitution as evidence the Framers were not fans of finality?