The Justification for Suspending Imprisonment: A Comparative Study of Iranian-French Law

awmakers today accepted the mechanism of justifying the sentence, which means requiring the judge to justify and explain his choice when issuing a prison sentence, in order to ensure that the criminal court judge does not issue the arbitrary prison sentence. According to this approach, the judge can only issue a suspended prison sentence as a last choice, in which case he must justify the necessity of the non-suspended sentence in the light of the severity of the offense and the characteristics of the offender, and also in the case that the other sentence implementation assurances appear to be clearly inappropriate. However, if a prison sentence is issued, it should be determined how to implement it as an open prison within the framework of one of the appropriate facilities, such as a semi-liberty system or the implementation of the sentence under the supervision of electronic systems. If such measures cannot be implemented, justification should be given to provide the possibility of exercising control over the higher courts.Although the various provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure have previously provided the justification of the sentence, the justification of a non-suspended prison sentence, which raises a degree of mistrust towards the judge who issued the sentence, is innovative and new and goes beyond the concept established by the Lawmakers in the Code of Criminal Procedure. The above-mentioned requirement to justify prison sentences on the one hand can prevent the issuing of a non-suspended prison sentence and, on the other hand, can lead to the changing of the execution place of an open prison sentence, using institutions such as the semi-liberty system.