What is the shortest recorded prison or jail sentence in US history?
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1A more interesting question would be to figure out what would have happened if the convict spent the 1 minute prior to the prosecution filed its appeal brief for a heavier sentence? Would the prohibition of double jeopardy protect them from retrial and potential repeated punishment?– HJayDec 19, 2022 at 4:14
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1@HJay the prosecution can appeal for a heavier sentence?– SomeoneDec 19, 2022 at 5:06
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2@Someone Yes, an appeal can result in a stronger or weaker sentence for the accused. At least as far as I know.– PMFDec 19, 2022 at 11:51
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Sub-day sentences happen all the time for minor crimes. Somebody is arrested, goes to jail for an hour or two to get booked in, photographed/fingerprinted and to arrange bail. The sentence ends up being "time served" and a fine.– user71659Dec 20, 2022 at 4:07
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1@user71659 is that really a case where the person is sentenced to jail? I was thinking of a judge actually including "one minute in jail" or something similar as part or all of a sentence.– SomeoneDec 20, 2022 at 5:07
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1 Answer
Likely an extremely hard or impossible question to answer, and may very well be one that may, barely anyone would go to appeals for a sub-1 day sentence, and it searching superior court decisions is far from well-digitized, and there are over 3,000 counties in the U.S.. Since they generally have no binding effect on future cases there is no incentive in digitizing older cases at all. I would not be surprised if during the history of the U.S., certain courts would have lost their past records for example in fires, earthquakes or other acts of God, including of such cases that no one remembered at the time, and no other record existed of any more.
If you're lucky, some historian may have somehow answered this question, and is somewhere as a trivia. Also, I have never heard a sentence to be expressed in hours, minutes or seconds, so likely the answer will be a single day which plausibly could have happened where other remedies were not appropriate (defendant not having money and incapacitated from being able to do community service or engage in labor or service in servitude per a sentencing).
UPDATED — There is record, in fact, of a 1906 case where a judge sentenced a man for 1 minute in jail for "being drunk and disorderly" "what was probably the lightest sentence ever given a prisoner, that of one minute in the county jail[;]" (The One Minute Jail Sentence) but of course, even less than a 150 years in the existence of the Union, they could not assert that with certainty.
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3Note that jail and prison are different things. The OP asked for prison, but you answered for jail. Dec 19, 2022 at 11:15
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3@JörgWMittag Without specifying an exact jurisdiction and the variety of English, the distinctions may not exist or are not meaningful. Additionally, even if jail and prison can be clearly distinguished in some specific context, "prison sentence" is usually interpreted more as "a sentence of imprisonment" than "a sentenced to be served in prison and not jail".– xngtngDec 19, 2022 at 11:35
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1@JörgWMittag on top of that, short sentences of imprisonment are frequently served in jail. The judge won't normally specify where the sentence is to be served; whether it's a jail or a prison will depend on whether the duration is more or less than a certain threshold. If you truly want to consider only those sentences actually served in prison then the answer is likely to be dictated by the shortest such threshold, which might be as short as three or six months, but the few that I'm actually familiar with are all one year (though I imagine that there are exceptions that I'm unfamiliar with).– phoogDec 19, 2022 at 12:22
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