Abstract
While penal bite of different sanctions has been the focus of common law scholars, it has been virtually neglected in continental sentencing scholarship and never discussed in detail in Czech. Based on von Hirsch's proportionality theory, this article presents theory that should govern relationships between sanctions of different types and amounts.
Confrontation of this theory with legal provisions and courts' practice demonstrates many problems: It is impossible to impose intermediate sanctions for crimes, the intermediate sanctions and suspended sentence thresholds are improperly balanced, there is no hierarchy of intermediate sanctions and prison sentences upon their default are not structured in a proportional way. Based on the presented theory and on these problems, a sentencing reform enabling fulfillment of ordinal proportionality is outlined.
Particular attention is paid to the suspended prison sentence, which is argued, should be transformed into Swedish-style suspended sentence, meaning only a supervision period, but not the length of the prison sentence should be initially set by a court.