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Managing Collateral Consequences in the Sentencing Process: The Revised Sentencing Articles of the Model Penal Code (2015)

Love, Margaret Colgate. Wisconsin Law Review 247-287.

The American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code: Sentencing (MPC), which integrates collateral consequences into a sentencing system that gives the court rather than the legislature responsibility for shaping and managing criminal punishment in particular cases. Just as the court decides what sentence it will impose within a statutory range, the court also decides which mandatory collateral penalties will apply and for how long. This gives sentencing courts new tools to further the rehabilitative goals of sentencing, and at the same time it enables them to avert issues of proportionality and procedural fairness that lurk in any categorical scheme. In effect, the MPC scheme converts collateral consequences from senseless punishment to reasonable case-specific regulation.

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