> But if we were going to go that route eventually, perhaps a system where a judge is provided the "impartial" judgment as additional information or where the decisions are reviewed by a judge before sentencing and could be lessened/cancelled but not increased?

That is basically what we do in the federal system. Judges have to calculate sentences using a mechanical, point-based system called the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. The judge has discretion to depart from the calculated sentence, but in practice the guideline sentence has a powerful anchoring effect.

And it's terrible. Turns out that its much easier to formulate a system with inhumanely long sentences when you're a committee developing an abstract point-scoring system than when you're an individual judge faced with deciding the fate of a living, breathing human in front of you.