3rd Annual Academic Symposium - Matt Marksberry, Jacob Rhodes, and Danielle Smith

The United States nation has a history of punishing minor offenses with major punishments; in addition we institute a ‘zero-tolerance’ method of policing, mandatory sentencing laws and have essentially taken away the ability for a judge to exercise common sense judgment when sentencing an offender. As a nation and a people, we live by our Constitution and Bill of Rights, but what happens when due process and procedure get to the point where using common sense is totally lost and everything that happens in our judicial system is based solely on modus operandi? “The criminal law should once again be more like the common law, with judges and juries not merely finding fact, but making law on the basis of universal principles of fairness, circumstance and seriousness and crafting penalties to the exigencies of the crime" (Gopnick).