01-07-2019, 05:19 PM
(01-07-2019, 05:09 PM)GMDino Wrote: I'm just happy that this woman doesn't have her entire life thrown away ver her horrible choices and her awful start.
I believe this is how the legal system works.
Actually, no, that's not how the legal system works. Crimes have proscribed punishments. First degree murder coupled with robbery comes with the highest possible punishments.
Quote:I also have experienced this on a personal level. Not my child, but a relative who was killed. It was an accident (allegedly) and I knew the killer too. He's related to my wife.
So not murdered in cold blood but killed in an accident. While I sympathize with your loss those are not remotely the same thing.
Quote:Good kid with a bad start and not much of a chance.
In prison he got his GED and learned a work skill. He's out on probation now and has a chance to be a better person.
So not first degree murder and he's out on parole now (not probation) after improving himself while detained. Now that's how the criminal justice system is supposed to work.
Quote:That doesn't take away the pain from the family of the person killed...but keeping him in jail forever would not also.
I completely agree. But he also didn't commit first degree murder and robbery.
Quote:Sometimes we have to look at the individual circumstances and see if, as a society, we can try and make it better despite our innate desire to punish completely.
By sometimes do you mean when you become a cause celeb and people spread deliberate falsehoods about your crime?
Quote:Maybe that's just me...but I see others who agree that the initial sentencing was too harsh for other reasons too. So maybe it's not just me.
Too harsh? maybe. You also don't see a single other person agreeing with you on outright clemency. You want to commute her sentence to twenty-five or thirty years, I think most people could live/agree with that. Serving fourteen years for first degree murder coupled with robbery is obscene.
