Definition
An accumulative judgment is a second or additional criminal sentence imposed on a person who has already been convicted and sentenced, which is ordered to take effect only after the completion of the prior sentence. It does not run alongside the first sentence but is postponed to follow it sequentially. The practical effect is that the defendant must serve the sentences back-to-back rather than simultaneously.
The term applies exclusively in criminal practice. It describes a structural relationship between two sentences, not a type of underlying offense or conviction.
Common Confusion
ACCUMULATIVE JUDGMENT vs. CONSECUTIVE SENTENCE: These terms describe the same sentencing structure. Accumulative judgment is the historical term; consecutive sentence is the modern equivalent. Researchers must search both when working across time periods in the corpus.
ACCUMULATIVE JUDGMENT vs. CONCURRENT SENTENCE: A concurrent sentence runs simultaneously with another sentence. An accumulative (consecutive) judgment runs only after the prior sentence is completed. These are structural opposites, and the distinction is outcome-determinative for sentence length calculations.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research trap here is terminological. Accumulative judgment is an older formulation of what modern courts and statutes almost universally call a consecutive sentence. A researcher working in historical criminal records, appellate opinions from the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, or older treatises will encounter this term where a modern court would simply say "consecutive." Researchers searching for doctrine about accumulative judgments in contemporary materials will largely come up empty — the concept is fully intact, but the vocabulary has changed.
When tracing sentencing history in the Law Mind corpus, be alert to this shift. Pre-twentieth-century materials favor accumulative judgment; twentieth-century materials trend toward consecutive sentence, with the older term disappearing from common judicial usage by the mid-1900s. Cross-referencing between the two terms is essential to complete any longitudinal research project on sentencing structure.
A secondary trap is conflation with the civil judgment context. The word "accumulative" appears in civil procedure as well — accumulative remedies, accumulative evidence — and a researcher scanning broadly may surface civil materials that are not responsive to criminal sentencing questions. The Burrill and Bouvier definitions both open with "in criminal practice," a signal that contemporaneous authors understood the term as domain-specific.
For enforcement and post-judgment research, the distinction between accumulative (consecutive) and concurrent sentences carries real consequences for calculating sentence expiration dates, parole eligibility, and the timing of any collateral civil disabilities that attach to conviction. Those downstream questions connect directly to the enforcement of judgments literature.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's, Bouvier's, and Burrill's are in close agreement. All three define accumulative judgment as a second or additional sentence that takes effect after expiration of the first. Bouvier adds the phrase "given against or passed upon one who has already been convicted," which makes explicit that the prior conviction must already exist — it is not enough that charges are pending. Black's formulation emphasizes that "execution" of the second judgment is postponed, which frames the concept from the enforcement side: it is about when the sentence runs, not about the merits of guilt.
Burrill's entry appears truncated in the available source, but its opening clause tracks the others closely. No significant divergence exists among the three.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: they say nothing about the judicial discretion involved in imposing an accumulative judgment versus a concurrent sentence, nothing about legislative presumptions (some modern jurisdictions presume concurrence absent express order), and nothing about the procedural mechanics of how the postponement is enforced. These are live research questions that require moving beyond the definitional sources into primary law.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See: Enforcement of Judgments — Execution, Domestication, and Post-Judgment Discovery (The Law Mind Remedies & Equity Encyclopedia) for the mechanics of judgment enforcement that bear on how accumulative sentences are carried out and tracked.