Suspended sentence

A suspended sentence is a legal term for a judge's delaying of a defendant's serving of a sentence after they have been found guilty, in order to allow the defendant to perform a period of probation. If the defendant does not break the law during that period, and fulfills the particular conditions of the probation, the judge usually dismisses the sentence.

In Australia, suspended sentences are commonly imposed in order to alleviate the strain on overcrowded prisons. For example, an individual may be sentenced to a six-month jail term, wholly suspended for six months; if they commit any other offence during that year, the original jail term is immediately applied in addition to any other sentence.

As of 1 September, 2014, suspended sentences no longer exist in Victoria.

In the People's Republic of China (excluding Hong Kong and Macau), both suspended sentences and suspended sentencing (Chinese: 缓刑, also translated as a sentence "with reprieve") are featured in the criminal law. In the first situation, a fixed term sentence of three years or below can be suspended. In the second situation, sentencing does not immediately follow the guilty verdict, but instead is determined after a period of probation.

Death sentences can also be suspended (called a "death sentence with reprieve"), so that an offender who does not intentionally re-offend during the two-year suspension period would have the sentence commuted to a life sentence.

Suspended sentence is called ehdollinen vankeusrangaistus in Finnish, which translates to "conditional imprisonment". When a sentence of imprisonment is imposed conditionally, the enforcement of the sentence is postponed for a probation period. The length of the probation period is at least one and at most three years. The probation period begins at the pronouncement or the issue of the judgment. When conditional imprisonment is imposed, the convicted person shall be notified, in connection with the pronouncement or the issue of the judgment, of the date when the probation period ends and of the grounds on which the sentence may be ordered to be enforced.

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