Despite all efforts to rationalize and scientifically substantiate it, the determination of sentences remains one of the processes in the German criminal procedure that is most resistant to predictability and verifiability. The judicial assessment of the act and the personality of the offender decides the extent of the punishment in each individual case. In this work, the author advocates for the introduction of binding sentencing guidelines to legally frame and make the sentencing process verifiable. In a first step, the criteria for determining the sentence and their justification under the principle of culpability and constitutional requirements for intersubjectively comprehensible and predictable sentencing decisions are examined. Christoph Reichert concludes that the previously held concepts for the legal regulation of sentencing are insufficient.