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Sentenced  or  Sentencing or Custodial Sentence

The purposes of Sentencing are:

·         Punishment – usually means imposing a sentence that inflicts some kind of pain or loss on the offender.

·         Rehabilitation – means imposing a sentence that will help to change the offender's behaviour into that of a responsible citizen.

·         Specific deterrence – means discouraging the particular offender from committing more crimes.

·         General deterrence – refers to the idea that potential offenders in the community will be discouraged from committing a particular crime when they see the penalty imposed for that kind of offence.

·         Denunciation – is a formal public expression that the behaviour is unacceptable to the community.

·         Community Protection – means both protecting the community from the offender and from crime generally.

·         Restorative Justice – means promoting the restoration of relations between the community, the offender and the victim.

A sentence is a decree of punishment of the court in criminal procedure.

In law, a sentence forms the final explicit act of a judge-ruled process as well as the symbolic principal act connected to their function. The sentence can generally involve a decree of imprisonment, a fine, and/or other punishments against a defendant convicted of a crime. Those imprisoned for multiple crimes will serve a consecutive sentence (in which the period of imprisonment equals the sum of all the sentences served sequentially, or one after the next), a concurrent sentence (in which the period of imprisonment equals the length of the longest sentence where the sentences are all served together at the same time), or somewhere in between, sometimes subject to a cap. Additional sentences include intermediate, or those served on the weekend (usually Fri-Sun); determinate, or a specific set amount of time (90 days); and indeterminate, which are those that have a minimum and maximum time (90 to 120 days). If a sentence is reduced to a less harsh punishment, then the sentence is said to have been "mitigated" or "commuted". Rarely (depending on circumstances), murder charges are "mitigated" and reduced to manslaughter charges. However, in certain legal systems, a defendant may be punished beyond the terms of the sentence (e.g., social stigma, loss of governmental benefits, or collectively, the collateral consequences of criminal charges).

Statutes often specify the range of penalties that may be imposed for various offences, and sentencing guidelines sometimes regulate what punishment within those ranges can be imposed given a certain set of offence and offender characteristics. However, in some jurisdictions, prosecutors have great influence over the punishments actually handed down, by virtue of their discretion to decide what offences to charge the offender with and what facts they will seek to prove or to ask the defendant to stipulate to in a plea agreement. It has been argued that legislators have an incentive to enact tougher sentences than even they would like to see applied to the typical defendant since they recognize that the blame for an inadequate sentencing range to handle a particularly egregious crime would fall upon legislators, but the blame for excessive punishments would fall upon prosecutors^.

Sentencing adult offenders.

Justice for the Innocent Victim/s does not appear to be a consideration when Sentencing criminals convicted of Sadistic, Brutal, Premeditated, Unprovoked Murder/s.

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