Timothy Tyler was arrested for selling five grams of the hallucinogenic drug LSD to a friend who was working as an informant for the federal government. In 1996, Scott Walker was arrested for being a low-level pusher of LSD, cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamine. If their arrests for these nonviolent offenses had happened today, Tyler and Walker-lacking criminal records-would have been punished with relatively short prison sentences. Instead, both of them are still behind bars and can expect to spend the rest of their lives there. Under a formula adopted by the U.S. government in 1987, federal judges could not deviate from strict sentencing guidelines for nonviolent crimes. For these offenders, the best hope for freedom is clemency, a process through which the president of the United

States or a state governor essentially forgives an inmate's wrongdoing and sets her or him free from prison. If Tyler's case would have been tried after 2005, Judge Gilbert could have deviated from the life sentence and given a less punishment. This is called:

A. departure.
B. discretion.
C. divergence.
D. disparity.


Answer: A

Criminal Justice

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