Emerging Trends and the General Framework for the Exercise of Sentencing Discretion in Botswana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Like other common law jurisdictions, Botswana has, in recent years, seen an increase in the number of interventions by the legislature to structure sentencing powers of judges through primary legislation. This trend has given rise to concerns about the erosion of the sentencing discretion of judges in some quarters. Against this background the present paper outlines and discusses the nature of discretion exercisable by judges in sentencing matters in Botswana and the general framework for the exercise of such powers. The paper argues that despite the recent increase in the volume of mandatory minimum enactments, the general framework for the exercise of discretion in Botswana remains fundamentally unchanged not least because the courts have in some measure reclaimed some of the discretion they had lost as a result of unprecedented expansion in the volume of mandatory minimum legislation in the 1990s. More positively, a recent amendment to the Penal Code restoring some of the judges’ discretion suggests that parliament has come to recognise the need for and importance of greater flexibility in the structure of the sentencing discretion of judges.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".