Cite as: 530 U. S. 466 (2000)
Opinion of the Court
defendant shall be convicted of the common-law felony only." Id., at 188.8
We should be clear that nothing in this history suggests that it is impermissible for judges to exercise discretion— taking into consideration various factors relating both to offense and offender—in imposing a judgment within the range prescribed by statute. We have often noted that judges in this country have long exercised discretion of this nature in imposing sentence within statutory limits in the individual case. See, e. g., Williams v. New York, 337 U. S. 241, 246 (1949) ("[B]oth before and since the American colonies became a nation, courts in this country and in England practiced a policy under which a sentencing judge could exercise a wide discretion in the sources and types of evidence used to assist him in determining the kind and extent of punishment to be imposed within limits fixed by law" (emphasis added)). As in Williams, our periodic recognition of judges' broad discretion in sentencing—since the 19th-century shift in this country from statutes providing fixed-term sentences to those providing judges discretion within a permissible range, Note, The Admissibility of Character Evidence in Determining Sentence, 9 U. Chi. L. Rev. 715 (1942)—has been regularly accompanied by the qualification that that discretion was bound by the range of sentencing options prescribed by the legislature. See, e. g., United States v. Tucker, 404 U. S. 443, 447 (1972) (agreeing that "[t]he Government is also on solid ground in asserting that a
8 To the extent the principal dissent appears to take issue with our reliance on Archbold (among others) as an authoritative source on the common law of the relevant period, post, at 525, 526, we simply note that Archbold has been cited by numerous opinions of this Court for that very purpose, his Criminal Pleading treatise being generally viewed as "an essential reference book for every criminal lawyer working in the Crown Court." Biographical Dictionary of the Common Law 13 (A. Simpson ed. 1984); see also Holdsworth, The Literature of the Common Law, in 13 A History of English Law 464-465 (A. Goodhart & H. Hanbury eds. 1952).
481
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