The Criminal Justice System Of The United States Constitution

The government has the authority to arrest, indict, try, and sentence individuals that have been accused of committing a crime. In an attempt to balance this authority the United States Constitution guarantees a number of inalienable rights to protect its citizens against tyrannical government power. These rights create the framework of the adversarial criminal justice system that relies heavily on the advocacy of each party and a relatively passive and impartial judge acting as a neutral arbiter. The objective of this structure is to encourage the advocates to develop relevant facts, evidence, and legal interpretations that determine guilt or innocence. This is distinct from inquisitorial systems of justice where the court plays an active†¦show more content†¦The PSR is then disclosed to the defendant prior to sentencing to provide the opportunity to contest inaccurate assertions in the report. Once specific objections are raised, the judge is obliged to make a finding as t o the factual dispute. However since the Sentencing Guidelines do not mandate a full evidentiary hearing and the means by which the judge comes to this conclusion is left entirely to his own discretion. Ultimately, the determinations of fact greatly impact the sentencing range the defendant is exposed to. At trial, the resolution of disputed facts is guided by constitutional guarantees of confrontation and rules of evidence that limit inadmissible and irrelevant information. However many of these protections have been removed, abridged, and ignored at sentencing effectively changing the role of the judiciary in an adversarial system. Since the imposition of sentencing guidelines, an equally critical part of the criminal system has become the sentencing phase which has evolved to become a trial in its own right when its purpose is to address and resolve factual inaccuracies in the PSR. Without the same formalities of trail, the disregard of adversarial protections becomes especially troubling when the PSR primarily serves as evidence enhancing sentencing. Therefore, the use of the PSR as an adversarial tool in modern sentencing has eroded the framework of the adversarial system in three