Template:United States Sentencing Guidelines/doc

This template is used to cite the U.S. Federal Sentencing Guidelines inline. It provides an external web link directly to a specified page within the Guidelines Manual, located on the website of the United States Sentencing Commission (http://www.ussc.gov). The latest edition supported by this template is the 2012 Guidelines Manual, effective as of November 1, 2012.

Optionally, the year of a previous edition may be specified instead, when one wants to cite the Sentencing Guidelines that were in effect on a given date. Each year's edition becomes effective on November 1st of the specified year. Generally, a court "shall use the Guidelines Manual in effect on the date that the defendant is sentenced" (see ). The exception to this rule occurs when the court determines that such use would violate the ex post facto clause of the Constitution – in other words, if the sentencing guidelines have changed so as to increase the penalty "after the fact", so that the sentence is more severe on the sentencing date than was established on the date that the offense was committed. In that event, "the court shall use the Guidelines Manual in effect on the date that the offense of conviction was committed" (see ).

This template links to external sites. External links should not normally be used in the body of an article; see External links for discussion of acceptable and unacceptable uses.

General usage



 * where year any year from 2005 through 2012 (inclusive).
 * where year any year from 2005 through 2012 (inclusive).

2012 is the default edition used by this template. Note that the Sentencing Commission's website has yet to standardize the directory structures of its archives. Therefore, specifying a year that lies outside of the above range is not likely to produce a valid link – any such use is at your own risk, and you are responsible to test the validity of the generated links!

Linking to a sentencing table
When a link to the Sentencing Table itself is desired, special syntax must be used, depending on the desired year (an intended future enhancement is to "hide" this complexity in the template's logic, but we're not there yet). Capitalization doesn't matter, but otherwise the entry must look as follows:

For the current year's Sentencing Table:

For 2008–2011 Sentencing Tables:

For 2005–2007 Sentencing Tables:

Planned enhancements

 * 1) Create a y option, to make it easy to cite any given year's Sentencing Table
 * 2) Create a y option, to generate a "full citation" more suitable for reference lists. Such a reference might look like:


 * United States Sentencing Commission (November 2012). Guidelines Manual. "§3E1.1".