Mandatory sentencing guidelines: The framing of justice *

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Blakely v. Washington (2004) (hereinafter, Blakely) and U.S. v. Booker (2005) (hereinafter, Booker) decisions surprised and caused considerable consternation among sentencing guidelines advocates. Many descriptions detail the Court’s decisions and their potential effect on the ability of guidelines to constrain judicial discretion (including earlier articles in Criminology & Public Policy; see Bushway and Piehl, 2007; Frase, 2007; Hofer, 2007). In Booker, the Supreme Court preserved the federal guidelines’ constitutionality by moving them from presumptive to advisory. This shift raised concerns that an advisory standard would undermine the guidelines’ ability to reduce sentencing disparity. Wooldredge (2009, this issue) tests the impact of the Ohio Supreme Court’s application of Blakely, with the Booker fix, on Ohio’s sentencing guidelines (State v. Foster, 2006; hereinafter, Foster). In this decision, the Ohio Supreme Court followed the lead of the U.S. Supreme Court in Booker, in which the Court found that the guidelines would be constitutional if they were advisory rather than presumptive. Wooldredge’s pre-post evaluation of the impact of the Foster decision found no major change in sentencing patterns. This outcome is unsurprising given earlier findings that Ohio’s sentencing guidelines had little impact on sentencing disparity. But the cause for little impact was best captured by Wooldredge, Griffin, and Rauschenberg (2005: 863) when they observed “the shift to determinate sentencing guidelines might have had a negligible effect on relationships involving extralegal characteristics simply because these relationships were weak to begin with.” Here, Wooldredge et al. (2005) suggested something worth noting, which is that little extralegal disparity existed preguidelines. But this assessment deals with a state in which the sentencing guidelines were less structured and less presumptive