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My read on things is that this is most likely what the defendant told police, which is tantamount to a confession to involuntary manslaughter. It's not so much that I'm taking it at face value because I feel like it, but because the prosecution has to run with this theory. Okay, they don't have to, but if they don't they run into evidentiary concerns. Like I said, the guy gave what amounts to a confession to police shortly after the incident occurred without an attorney present. This is strong evidence for the prosecution, and it's hard for the defense to rebut. If they want to run with a different theory, they aren't going to be able to introduce the confession. Instead, they'll have to rely on eyewitness accounts, of which there are plenty to choose from. So many, in fact, that for every witness they can find who supports the story they want to tell, the defense will be able to find one that contradicts it; early reporting suggested that the accounts were conflicting. Add in cross-examination on both sides and you run a serious risk that the jury concludes that there isn't enough evidence to convict. And even if the jury believes your story, the outcome is the same, except maybe it affects sentencing. I wouldn't think the prosecutor would find that to be a worthwhile tradeoff.
As for the aggravating factors, yeah, you can make those arguments. And maybe a jury will buy them. But we're not talking about a conviction here, we're only talking about sentencing, and all it really means is that the judge is permitted to take them into consideration. While I don't think there was ever any chance of an acquittal in this case, I do think it's possible that they would have found that the aggravating factors weren't proven. I'll add that I think the California system is stupid and that there need to be more definite guidelines when it comes to sentencing, but all of this stuff only applies to what the maximum sentence could have been, not what the recommended range was.
I think this actually gets to the heart of your complaint, namely that you don't think the penalties are severe enough. That's an issue for politicians, not judges. Like I said, if he had done what he did in Pennsylvania, the guidelines only call for 5 to 8 months, and the max is 22 months, and that would require a serious criminal history. In Ohio, the max is 36 months. And while you can look at max sentences all you want, the reality is that most sentences are going to be substantially lower than that if they're a first offense. I don't know what the typical sentence for this kind of thing would be in California, but unless you can show me examples of similar cases that ended in higher sentences, I'm disinclined to believe that what he got was out of line, because it doesn't seem out of line compared with states I'm more familiar with.
And I don't know the point of bringing up Rittenhouse. Yes, he was acquitted. He spent about 3 months in jail and got bond despite being charged with three homicide counts, one of which was first degree. OJ Simpson also got acquitted, and he spent 15 months in jail. Unless you want to eliminate pretrial detention entirely, it's just part of the system. Some people who get acquitted are going to spend time in jail awaiting trial.
? Do you have a name for this rule? Because while the prosecutors would have to supplement the confession, but it's still very good evidence for many of the prongs of their theory (and various rules re: completeness/prejudicial effect yada yada not relevant here). I -- and three different LLMs -- can't find a principle where they aren't able to introduce the confession just because they disagree with the defense.
The prosecutor has objected to this indicated sentence, and did not plea bargain to it himself before this point, and had charged and continued to chase the enhancements.
It also means that the judge has the media circus, all the reported testimony, and oh, somebody who's really familiar with courtroom and judicial politics just said something about "a lot fewer people are following the case now than would be if it goes to trial, and advocates for the prosecution have to deal with the elation of the guilty verdict followed by the disappointment of the sentence."
No.
I'd be prefer a system where justice is resilient, reliable, speedy, and punishment is light for all but those rare offenses with the clearest intent and surest evil. I'd also, alternatively, be fine with one where we accept that justice is slow, and imperfect, and tries to compensate by throwing the book at those few caught. We don't have either of those systems.
Instead, we have one where the penalties are severe and the process itself is severe... sometimes. And then other times the penalties are far lighter, and the process involves a judge bending over backwards to accept a defense's not-very-plausible claims and bend them til culpability disappears like a stage magician's worst trick. And while the disparity isn't solely explained by political considerations, they align better than the severity of the offense, or the culpability of the attacker, or the innocence of the victim, or any of those things that makes for a sympathetic-if-not-quite-ideal blindness of the judicial system.
Porque no los dos? It can not simultaneously be true that the judge has widespread and unquestionable authority to give a wide variety of sentences ranging from the abominably low to the egregiously high, and that they have zero responsibility for a sentence they unilaterally presented a not!pleabargain. It also speaks poorly of California politicians that this is happening, and they do nothing, or make the problem worse. I will note and comment that California partisans are partisans, and if you want me to give a nice big rant about places where I think California politicians have shown illegitimate prioritization of harsh sentencing in the justice system, we're gonna need a bigger character limit.
More critically, it's a problem for the system as a whole, no matter where you decide to place the fault.
I don't think this is a useful exercise. One of the most similar cases was high-profile as a moral abomination for going straight to probation... on an eight-year sentence, after credit for five years time served. Less meaningful because it did not have even the possibility of political aggression first? More meaningful because it had no use of a weapon? There were rumors he had juvie history, but at least publicly he's supposed to have no prior criminal history. What about eight years prison for a deadly punch? Does it say more because he was drunk, or less because he was an asshole and tried to hide his culpability?
I think part of the difference might be downstream of charging 12022.7(b), not (a) in those cases, and there's a reasonable argument that distinction is especially bullshit in cases like this, but if the expected difference-in-sentencing was two years rather than more than four or five I'd not be complaining as loud (and not be nearly so focused on the judge).
Those were the first two remotely relevant ones I could find (after several not-involuntary manslaughter cases, a bunch of car crashes, a couple illegal silicone injections gone bad), but you'll have to take my word that I didn't put a monstrous amount of selection bias behind them. Even if you believe me, there's near-certainty that the ones getting reported on have some selection bias going on. Those two examples did go to trial, but then again, we're supposed to believe that this indicated sentence is what the judge believes is the correct sentence had the guy here gone to trial!
And I’m still not convinced that this is the central example of involuntary manslaughter such that the average sentence should be predictive here; I stumbled across cases in Pennsylvania with longer sentences than your proposed guidelines example and similar factual scenarios and no criminal history.
How many days was Mr. Alnaji in pre-trial detention? What was his bond set at? Was either number one-third, or one-fifth, or a one-tenth, of Mr. Rittenhouse's?
I'm bringing it forward as one of many examples of a widespread tendency across a broad set of interrelated systems. I can repeat the comparisons to the Hammonds, Adamiak, Dexter Taylor, and countless others for other parts of the process. But it matters that it's not just sentencing, even though the sentencing difference is one of the most harmful. Not just because it's so difficult to present varied examples with any level of comparison, or even because a problem or the appearance of a problem only limited to one judge or one step of the criminal justice process it would be a smaller problem.
Because I'll point again to "Justice is not, under present conditions, the presumed outcome of a process." It's important that the criminal justice system not only be just, but be clearly just. That's not happening when judges sneak
plea bargainsindicated sentences out of the eye of the victim's family and media, where there are so many degrees of freedom than the outcome of a case can fall entirely to how an individual judge or prosecutor felt that morning, and when we're stuck trying to pull together phantasmal statistics about similar cases or salami-slice away how all those other inconsistencies don't count, and that's just the obvious problems here.More options
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