Role Of Discretion In The Criminal Justice System

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Discretion in Criminal Justice This day in age discretion is an enormous deal in the scope of criminal justice, whether more discretion is being granted, or more is being taken away from the system as a whole, it is a massive topic to be discussed. Discretion is defined as the power or right to decide or act according to one’s own judgement in a given situation (“Discretion” n.d). Today I am going to tell you about discretion in three different ways, firstly I will explain the use of discretion in policing, then I will explain how discretion is used or not used in courts and sentencing, and finally I will tell you why I feel discretion is an necessary part of our criminal justice system here in the United States of America. The first place …show more content…

One of the many elements that have changed is the amount of discretion that is allowed pertaining to certain actors in our criminal justice system. It used to be that judges were allowed a great deal of discretion when it came to sentencing an individual and they could hand out sentences based on a more individual case by case basis. It seems that today the discretion has been mostly removed so there is no longer a real sense of individual justice, it now seems like the sentences are more of an equation of sorts where the offenses and aggravating or mitigating circumstances are put into a formula and the sentence range is spit out for the judge to interpret. With this setup there is minimal discretion offered to judges to sentence someone unfairly. It seems as though the prosecutors of current times have been given less discretion as well, they to fall into the equation phenomenon and the only real discretion they are given is when offering plea deals. With the majority of these changes being more current I will present an example of how discretion was used by a judge in my own case in 2005. I received a speeding citation for going 173 mph in a 65 mph zone on the US-1 highway between Sanford and Raleigh, NC. After receiving this citation I had a court …show more content…

To close, I spoke about discretion in policing, discretion in courts and sentencing, and why I feel that discretion is necessary. I have only touched the tip of the iceberg so to speak on the topic of discretion and as we all understand, the tip of the iceberg isn’t what you worry about, it’s the massive ice below the surface that is the real issue. It will require the coming generations to figure out how discretion legitimately should be used or not used, and it’s up to us to make this great United States a fair and just country for us

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