Legal

In the United States and many other countries, sentencing is a separate phase of a criminal trial. Once a defendant has been convicted, a judge will typically determine his punishment in the sentencing phase — and that punishment can vary. We are so used to this that the origin of the tradition is rarely questioned. But why would two people who committed the same crime serve different jail sentences? You might assume the purpose is to allow the circumstances of the crime to be taken into account, and indeed this is its main use today. As it turns out, variable sentencing has a far darker past.

Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859. Its impact was enormous, and like many new developments in science it was used and abused to justify current social practice. For that time period, this included the Western belief in the inferiority of non-white races and the lower intelligence of women. Scientists believed they could predict intelligence by looking at the shape of a skull. Fortunately, these ideas have been relegated to the dust heap by today’s scientific community, but they were quite influential in […]