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California, 549 U.S. 270 (2007), is a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court held, 6–3, that the sentencing standard set forward in Apprendi v. New Jersey (2000) applies to California's determinate sentencing law. In California, a judge may choose one of three sentences for a crime—a low, middle, or high term.
The Uniform Determinate Sentencing Act of 1976 was a bill signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown to changes sentencing requirements in the California Penal Code.The act converted most sentences from an "indeterminate" sentence length at the discretion of the parole board to a "determinate" sentence length specified by the state legislature.
Volumes of the Thomson West annotated version of the California Penal Code; the other popular annotated version is Deering's, which is published by LexisNexis. The Penal Code of California forms the basis for the application of most criminal law, criminal procedure, penal institutions, and the execution of sentences, among other things, in the American state of California.
Proposition 36, also titled A Change in the "Three Strikes Law" Initiative, was a California ballot measure that was passed in November 2012 to modify California's Three Strikes Law (passed in 1994). The latter law punishes habitual offenders by establishing sentence escalation for crimes that were classified as "strikes", and requires a ...
Lockyer v. Andrade, 538 U.S. 63 (2003), [1] decided the same day as Ewing v. California (a case with a similar subject matter), [2] held that there would be no relief by means of a petition for a writ of habeas corpus from a sentence imposed under California's three strikes law as a violation of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments.
The Guidelines are the product of the United States Sentencing Commission, which was created by the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984. [3] The Guidelines' primary goal was to alleviate sentencing disparities that research had indicated were prevalent in the existing sentencing system, and the guidelines reform was specifically intended to provide for determinate sentencing.
After Chavez's sentencing in November, Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer said the "system failed this little girl." "The system failed her siblings," Spitzer said in a statement.
The exception to this rule occurs when the court determines that such use would violate the ex post facto clause of the Constitution – in other words, if the sentencing guidelines have changed so as to increase the penalty "after the fact", so that the sentence is more severe on the sentencing date than was established on the date that the ...