Comprehensive Review

The Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines were the product of an intense but brief effort by the Sentencing Guidelines Commission (1978-79) to promulgate the first sentencing guidelines in the nation in 1980. Although the Commission has updated the Guidelines many times and reviewed them in parts, it has never reviewed them comprehensively. Recently, the states of Pennsylvania and Washington—two other states with sentencing guidelines dating from the 1980s—conducted comprehensive reviews of their sentencing guidelines which has sparked interest in other states, including Minnesota, to follow suit. In 2022, MSGC decided to move forward with a Comprehensive Review and requested one-time funding from the legislature to proceed.