This is one reason. It is not the main reason or close to it, in my view. At the same time, anyone with experience in criminal litigation knows that judges vary widely in temperament, ideology, outlook and background, and that even the same judge can vary markedly from one day to the next depending, for example, on whether he had a fight with his wife that morning.
The principal reason Congress cut back on the previously almost unlimited sentencing discretion of judges in the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 is simple: It didn't work. It produced wide and irrational disparity, and it had meandered hither and yon for 25 years while crime exploded. The public demanded something better and Congress complied, with (so far as crime rate statistics suggest) excellent results.
Judges, by the nature of the business, must have a good deal of sentencing discretion a good deal of the time. Under our present system, they do. But judges are human beings, and human beings operate better with rules than without them. The news report with which I led off this entry is an extreme example of this fact, but a fact it is, in extreme cases and in more typical ones.
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