Justice Kennedy added that there was an international consensus against sentencing juveniles to life without parole, which he said had been "rejected the world over".
He added that the new policy announced by Sessions pays no heed to "a rare bipartisan political consensus" for sentencing reform and instead would revert to "a discredited past".
If such damages become widespread, experts say, it may make it easier to reach a consensus on measured sentencing.
But there's a general consensus that drug sentencing may be overly punitive.
"It was a dark and stormy night," begins Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel "Paul Clifford," which goes on to invoke torrential rain, gusting wind, guttering lamplight, and rattling rooftops: weather as plot, setting, star, and supporting cast of what is, by broad consensus, the worst sentence in the history of English literature.
As a result, the maximum sentence possible under certain scenarios has more than quadrupled.There was a broad consensus before 2001 that sentences for fraud in America were too short.
Someone came pretty close, but the general consensus was that the sentence required a syntactic tree.
Murphy described the pledge as "the end of the Smith consensus in a single sentence".
Your criticism of the Rockefeller drug laws speaks powerfully to the growing consensus that such mandatory minimum sentencing structures do more harm than good to both drug offenders and society at large.
Both have dropped since 2011, which the President sees as evidence not of a bipartisan consensus on the need for sentencing reform but as proof of the laxity and the bad faith of members of the Obama Administration, who, he said, had "looked at this scourge, and they let it go by".
