What are Federal Sentencing Guidelines?

Many cases in federal court end in some type of plea bargain, and federal sentencing guidelines are an extremely important part of that. Federal Sentencing Guidelines are, simply, a chart which a lawyer can look at and knowing some facts about your allegations and some facts about your case can get a pretty good idea of where your starting point is on a federal sentence. Federal sentences are fairly predictable based on that. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the circumstances. But, when someone is sentenced in federal court, the court is not required to (now) but most courts are pretty closely going to follow those sentencing guidelines, and so your lawyer can look at that and give you a pretty good idea of what your sentence is going to look like in federal court before it happens.