Sentencing the multiple offender : judicial practice and legal principle
This study examines the approach of Victorian judges to the determination of sentence for an offender convicted of multiple offences. Given that a substantial percentage of criminal cases involve a multiple offender and that the majority of offences are committed by repeat offenders, the sentencing of such offenders is a matter of significant public policy interest. The study is based on qualitative interviews with a group of Victorian County Court judges, an analysis of sentencing data on rape, armed robbery and burglary from Victorian County Court records, and a legal review of High Court decisions and Victorian Court of Appeal decisions. The study examines the way judges apply the totality principle in sentencing multiple offenders; whether sentences imposed these cases conform to the principle of proportionality; and whether proportionality, in respect to the multiple offender, can be expressed as a detailed policy, with associated guidelines. The empirical work undertaken in this study indicates that there is a need to develop a more detailed and comprehensive set of sentencing principles and an associated numerical framework for guidance.
Intuition, Structure and Sentencing: An Evaluation of Guideline Judgments
This article examines the place of intuition and method in the sentencing judgment in Australia. In doing this, it analyses two attempts to structure discretion; namely, guideline judgments and the two-stage approach, focusing on the former, since they represent a highly developed application of the latter. More specifically, it is about how judges should digest the facts of a case as they exercise their discretionary judgment as to what is appropriate by way of sentence. Thus, there is here not a general evaluation of guideline judgments canvassing lepal issues (e.g. constitutionality) and criminological matters (e.g. effectiveness).
Phenomenology and homeopathy.
There is a great overlap between the way of seeing the world in clinical homeopathy and in the technical philosophical system known as phenomenology. A knowledge of phenomenologic principles reveals Hahnemann to have been an unwitting phenomenologist. The ideas of phenomenology as applied to medicine show that homeopathy is the ideal medical system to fulfill the goals of coming ever closer to true patient concerns and experience of illness.