[BITList] One rule for all?

[x50type]

FYI
There is something undeniably galling about seeing Alexander sent away for 20 years, while Zimmerman, who shot a 17-year-old to death, walks free. But it is not clear that the answer is to broadly protect people who shoot guns in domestic situations and then claim self-defense. The more expansively courts interpret “stand your ground” in circumstances like Alexander’s, the more bullets are likely to be ricocheting through family homes, and the more deaths there are likely to be.

What is clear is that Alexander’s 20-year prison sentence is horrific. There is a different Florida law that is responsible for the length of the sentence: the so-called 10-20-Life statute, which says that if someone is convicted of an aggravated assault in which they discharge a firearm, they must be sentenced to 20 years in prison, regardless of mitigating circumstances. When Circuit Judge James Daniel sentenced Alexander, he declared that once the state proved its case, “the decision on an appropriate sentence” was “entirely taken out of my hands.”

Alexander’s case is less about “stand your ground” than about the horrors of excessive, inflexible sentencing laws. Whatever crimes legislators were thinking of when they decided to establish the mandatory 20-year prison sentence in 10-20-Life, there is no way they included a battered woman feeling threatened and firing a single shot that missed her abusive spouse. Given the facts of her case, prosecutors were being overzealous in charging Alexander with a crime that is punishable by a 20-year sentence.

There have been growing calls for Florida to repeal its “stand your ground” law. But people who care about making Florida’s criminal-justice system fairer should work just as hard to repeal the cruelly inflexible 10-20-Life statute. More immediately, Alexander’s sentence should be commuted, because it fails the most basic test of just punishment: it does not fit the crime.


ct




From: HUGH 
Sent: Friday, August 02, 2013 2:34 AM
To: BitList 
Subject: Re: [BITList] One rule for all?

John,

Had she shot the nearest black youth, we all know what she'd've got. But she 
shot a ceiling, and we know ceilings are immeasurably more valuable than 
black youths.  Each time I hear the happy sound of idiots around here 
rejoicing at the thought of their forthcoming month in Florida, I despair.

Hugh.


_______________________________________________
To unsubscribe from this email List, send an email to:
BITList-unsubscribe at lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com

BITList mailing list
BITList at lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com
http://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/mailman/listinfo/bitlist
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/pipermail/bitlist/attachments/20130802/ecf817fe/attachment.htm