ABSTRACT
Traditionally, legal academic writing and scholarship has tended to regard sentencing discretion as lacking sufficient structure and coherence. This lack of coherence, it has been argued, means that there is a lack of genuine openness and accountability in sentencing decision-making. According to this view, an important job of the sentencing scholar is to uncover the penal philosophies, which are said to drive individual sentencers' interpretations of case-factors. Therefore, it is said that transparency and accountability can only be achieved by explanations of sentencing in analytical and penal-philosophical terms.
