Sentence deliberation, as a part of a legal proceeding that follows establishing of guilt of the perpetrator, has great importance, and, from the viewpoint of punitive policy, its importance exceeds importance of all other elements of a legal proceeding, because this element directly gives form to the punitive policy of a country. A correct and just choice of the kind and the level of a criminal law sanction for a perpetrator of a crime is an exceptionally complex intelectual procedure from the domain of courts of law, and that procedure has its clearly delineated rules. On the basis of numerous cases from the legal practice in Bosnia and Hercegovina adduced in this paper, it points out the problem of insufficient keeping in touch with the evolution of sentence deliberation and the fact that legal practice continues to adhere to habitual, simplified rules in meting out the punishments, that are very often in contradiction with the very letter of the law. The conclusion that can be drawn from the presented paper is that a stereotypical, automatic, superficial and inexpert interrogation and assessment of the person of the perpetrator is one of the greatest problems in applying rules for sentencing and that one can't help feeling that the choice of the kind and the level of the criminal law sanction is still made mostly on the basis of intuitive and very uncertain criteria. The inevitable consequence of the absence of settled criteria, lack of uniformity and differences in choosing the kind and the severitiy of penalty is dispensing some lenient punishments and constant relaxing the boundaries set by writtten laws, that indicates the general tendency toward taking off the edge of the criminal law. Therefore, the main intention of this paper is pointing out the importance of a more thorough investigation of the circumstances pertinent to sentence deliberation and alignment of the interpretation of each of them, with the goal of producing unambiguous interpretation of the circumstances important for determining a sentence, that can only help in achieving the higher level of legal certainty.