A friend of the families sister was recently murdered by her husband. He had been beating her for years on and off and finally one night he beat her to death

He got 12 years and is eligible for parole in 7 (judge ruled it was not premeditated)

A Friend(from another time) got arrested for selling some weed(3oz) to an undercover cop. They wanted to give him 25 years eligible for parole in 12. (deal was made in a school zone)

How messed up are the laws in this country that selling some pot is worse than murdering someone.

 

That's horrible.

 

First off. . .my sympathies. . .

Secondly, that's the way this country is at times. Does anyone really get the justice they deserve!

I really wish we could do the "eye for an eye" laws. . .

More disturbing than the justice system is simply the way society deals with crime now and how crime has become so much more frequent with less motive. People killing people just for the hell of it!

 

yea, I simply do not understand it...

I'm sure the wife beater will get what's coming to him while in prison once some inmates find out about him.

I'm also assuming the pot dealer will be in a less secure prison than the one the wife beater is in.

 

Good point.

 

The major cause of thise problem is that punishments are set in large part based on how frequent the crimes are in addition to how severe. Crimes that are rampant and also happen to be on the naughty list of the 'powers that be' are singled out to be punished more harshly in an effort to curtail them.

In this case, the fact is that wife beatings and subsequent deaths (while utterly heinous) are far less common and visible than drug dealing, and there's no indication of a horribly escalating pattern of murder of any kind. City, county, and state officials (the laws and punishments you refer to are not "this country's" laws, rather your state's) are often elected to 'get the drug dealers off our streets' not to 'stop my neigbor from doing something behind closed doors that I am not aware of but would be horrified to find out about'.

In no way is any of the above to be taken as a defense of said imbalances, nor am I making excuses for the politicians who have enacted them. This is simply a socio-political _explanation_ for the observed phenomena...

 

Good explanation. However, many of our ridiculous drug laws are determined at a national level. This is why the sentances are so long. It's terrible that a convicted murderer or rapist receives a shorter sentance than someone who sells a few ounces of pot to the wrong person. I think some our politicians need to get off their holier-than-thou pedestals, remove their heads from their asses, and start addressing this country's frequently ass-backwards judicial system

integrate - Why should it matter how secure the prison is? Prison is prison, as far as the victims are concerned. 7 years in a supermax or 15 in a minimum - which would you rather do?

 

One other consideration is that the drug dealer was convicted of a crime which he intended to commit while the wife-beater was convicted of a crime which he did not intend to commit. (Note: I chose my words carefully there. I referred to the crimes for which they were convicted, not the crimes of which they were guilty. I, for one, can't say whether the man who beat his wife intended to kill her, but he wasn't convicted of intending to kill her.) The punishments in our legal system make the distinction (rightly so, in my opinion) between crimes committed intentionally and those committed inadvertantly. The problem here seems to be primarily one of applying the wrong law to the wife-beater.

In an attempt to forestall flames about the above paragraph, let me mention a woman in Santa Ana, CA who recently killed two school children by running into them with her car. The DA is not prosecuting her because they determined that it was an accident. While approaching the school to pick up her child she evidently pressed the accelerator rather than the brake and plowed into a group of children. Although the two children are no less dead than the wife mentioned above, surely this woman's punishment should be less severe than the above husband's.

 

Very well put! You never cease to amaze me, Bill.

If this was a discussion purely on the merits of our judicial system and the laws it enforces, I would argue that the law was applied properly to the wife-beater (who was seemingly sentanced for battery and/or unintentional homicide), although the sentance seems inadequate; whereas the law that determined that the person selling pot should not exist in the first place and therefore the law was applied unfairly to the dealer. Remeber, the undercover cop consented to being the victim (harming his body by smoking marijuana), whereas the wife did not consent to being a victim, in this case getting abused and eventually killed. But that's not really what we're talking about.

 

As a practical matter, DAs have to charge defendants with crimes for which they believe there's a good chance they can get a conviction, which sometimes isn't the crime of which they are guilty. In the case of the dope deal, the DA had a credible witness who could testify to the events and to the intent of the defendant. In the case of the wife-beating, there was undoubtedly no witness other than the defendant, credible or otherwise, who could testify about anything.

Although the results seem unfair, maybe we should be thankful that they were able to convict him of anything. Half-a-loaf is better than none.