The emergence of sentencing hearings

The aim of this essay is to contribute to the understanding of the neglected topic of sentencing hearings, by describing the historical circumstances that led to the emergence of distinct sentencing hearings within the criminal trial. The novel account offered in this essay suggests that sentencing hearings evolved as a partially unintended result of the massive changes in the adversarial trial that took place during the second part of the 18th century. As a result of these changes, sentencing hearings began to emerge at the end of the 18th century. These findings stand in contradiction to various suggestions made in American case-law and law review articles, which linked the development of sentencing hearings to the rise of the rehabilitation model at the end of the 19th century.