My object all sublime . . . to let the punishment fit the crime, the punishment fit the crime….
If you’re a Mikado fan, you know the source of my post title:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeajGK42vuE[/youtube]
The song came to mind because of two stories today, both of which left me wondering whether the punishment fit the crime.
One story you may already have read: an Iraqi living in Arizona was convicted of 2nd degree murder for intentionally running his daughter over with a car because she had become too “Westernized.” (Of course, if he was worried about that happening, a logical person might ask why he decided to move to the West in the first place.) A second degree murder conviction carries with it a sentence that can be as long as 22 years.
The other story just broke recently: the former head of a California mental hospital was sentenced to 248 years for sexually abusing his adopted son over an eight year period.
Both are heinous crimes, but does it seem to you that a deliberate murder is being treated more lightly than it should be?
When I was back and law school, a Crim Law professor liked to make a big deal out of two murder cases: when was a garden-variety bar killing that ended in a death sentence; the other was a torture-murder that ended with life imprisonment. His point was that the death sentence isn’t fair. My takeaway message, though, was that, if you’re planning a crime, you might want to pick a jurisdiction that allows you to get away with it, so to speak.