Abstract
One of the most crucial stages in any legal system's criminal proceedings is the decision-making process for assigning proportionate criminal sanctions. To achieve this, several advanced legal systems have developed principles known as guideline-oriented principles, and to ensure their comprehensiveness and accuracy, they have established bodies called sentencing commissions to oversee the creation of these guidelines. These guidelines include indicators related to the circumstances of the offense, the offender and their personal traits, and the victim, which judges consider when tailoring criminal responses. In the legal systems of United States, since there are no binding statutory requirements for sentencing, the responsibility of developing guideline-based principles to promote consistent judicial decisions has been delegated to the judiciary. Conversely, the Iranian legislator, drawing on recent comparative and penological developments, for the first time incorporated sentencing guidelines into the Iranian legal system through Article 18 of the Islamic Penal Code. It was anticipated that, by providing detailed criteria and establishing effective enforcement mechanisms, these guidelines would help individualize punishments and prevent inconsistent judgments. Using an analytical–descriptive approach, this article examines and analyzes the sentencing guideline systems in the United States and shows, within the context of legislative challenges, that the ambiguity and broadness of these guidelines, along with the absence of a judicial obligation to follow them, open the door for interpretive subjectivism and an emphasis on the uniformity of decisions based on quantity rather than individualized considerations.