Abstract:
The proliferation of sentencing frameworks is a welcome development in the sentencing jurisprudence. For the first time, appellate courts are giving guidance on how the entire sentencing range for a given offence (or a specified manifestation thereof) will be used by courts. However, since sentencing frameworks are but a species of the more classic sentencing precedent, the principles that govern when a sentencing court can refer to a sentencing precedent for one offence when calibrating the sentence for another should apply with equal force to the question of when the same court can calibrate the sentence for one offence with reference to the framework for another. To that end, this article argues that such reference is permissible so long as the offence before the court and the offence covered by a framework is analogous in policy and punishment, and that two species of such analogy comprise cases where the offences are ordinally proportionate to one another, and where the offences are part of the same criminal enterprise.