I realize this is how crimes are calculated in this jurisdiction; my point is more that the outcome of such a calculation sounds bizzare and pointless.
The real issue is whether this defendant ought to be removed entirely from society or not. If the decision is made that his crimes are so severe he ought to be removed from society, not sure what difference it makes if his parole eligibility is 200 years off, or 400. Unless there are some radical advances in medicine in the near future, the result is basically the same.
Life without possibility of parole is fine when you only have one conviction. When there are multiple convictions they have to be aggregated - and if you don’t itemize each portion of the sentence you (1) deny the opportunity for meaningful appellate review and (2) have no idea what the new sentence will be if some of the convictions are vacated on appeal.
What did you think of the defense? I’m assuming given the circumstances it was a public defender? Either way, it sounds like they didn’t have a lot to work with; did they do a good job with what they had?
Keep in mind that he was found guilty of a number of crimes (15 major counts) with various sentencing enhancements, not just one crime. The penalty for each of those things is calculated separately; depending on the exact crimes and (I assume) the judge’s discretion, some of those sentences may be served concurrently and some consecutively.
Perhaps none of the individual counts in this case mandated a life sentence, but many of the violent acts have penalties that are written to be served consecutively, so when the rules are applied, you get 10 years for this, 30 years for that, 50 years for this and so on. I don’t think it’s appropriate for the judge to not penalize the defendant for some of the crimes because 411 years is too long but 300 (200, etc) is “better”.
This guy did a series of horrific, violent things to an innocent woman. I feel completely comfortable with him getting the full sentence for everything, regardless of what it adds up to (and I was prepared to read that he got an official life sentence).
No, although towards the end of the case the judge left us chocolate mints after our afternoon break. We were allowed to bring coffee in (they provided water), some of us also brought in cough drops to share, just to minimize disruptions. Everyone was quite sensitive to keeping the jury comfortable, it’s in their best interests to have an awake and attentive jury.
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What do you think of the judge?
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She was quite good, kept things in order and proceeding smoothly, explained what was going on, etc. Very pleasant and friendly, as were all the officers of the court (clerks, baliffs, etc). There were actually two judges, the one who was originally assigned the case and then judge who actually heard the case (first judge had a family emergency and needed to hand the case over to the second judge). The original judge, not the one who heard the case, received our verdict.
I’ve been on jury duty twice and in both cases I’ve been impressed with how the judges acted.
She had a pretty tough job - another defendant who was there from beginning to end testified against our D, his testimony matched the victim’s testimony, both of them were very credible witnesses and there was a lot of physical & scientific evidence. The prosecution has to show that the defendant is guilty which they did; it was quite a strong case. The defense didn’t have much to offer - as noted earlier in the thread her closing argument was roughly “We don’t deny that these crimes were committed, we just can’t say for sure exactly who did which acts and it wasn’t a hate crime.”
No, she is not a public defender, she’s a private attorney.
The Contra Costa County judges are generally pretty good. There are a couple of jerks and idiots, but for the most part they are quite professional. The ones who do criminal work I rarely see as they do not also do civil except for Judge Zuniga, who likes doing both and will switch it up every few years.
Happy to share a behind-the-scenes look at the process.
I think at some point it is appropriate to charge a minor as an adult. I don’t know exactly what the dividing line is but I think the minors in this case went far beyond it.
Knowing what the defendants did and without going into too much detail I’ll say that this was not a situation where a kid made a bad choice and did something wrong in the heat of the moment. If the defendant had told that 15 year old to grab the victim’s wallet and the kid did so, that’d be one thing, but in this case three other people (the other defendants, including that 15 year old) watched what was going on, took steps to further it, kidnapped the seriously injured victim, took her to another location, allowed more horrific things to occur, then this kid got out and willfully participated & continued the assault even after the “adult” took off and left him there with the victim. When he was done, that kid sauntered off with his friend, leaving the victim lying there. This didn’t take a few minutes, it played out over an extended period of time.
None of those other three defendants went to trial, all of them pled guilty to various crimes. Even the non-sexual crimes were pretty serious (carjacking, kidnapping).
I know this is how it is done; I just think it is the wrong method.
To my mind, the judge should look at the totality of the evidence and craft an appropriate sentence. If that sentence is life in jail, so be it.
This mechanical toting up of crimes strikes me at least as not doing that. Not that I fully understand how it is determined when sentences are to be served consecutively as opposed to concurrently - maybe that adds some discretion into the system.
Take for example some guy who is convicted of a relatively minor crime, but has committed the same or a similar crime a large number of times. A struct accounting method may give him an absurdly lengthy sentence, even though his crimes, even in aggregate, do not warrant his complete removal from society.
I don’t think you are getting my objection. 300 or 200 years is not “better”, it is, for all practical purposes, exactly the same. He isn’t really “penalized” in the slightest - and presumably could not care less if it was increased to 1,000 years, or 1,000,000 years.
I have no objection to his result, either. My critique is of the method used to achieve it. He will never, in fact, serve 400 years, much less 411 years and 4 months, for the simple reason that people typically do not live for 400 years. In this particular case, that doesn’t matter in the slightest, since the result (in effect, a life sentence) would be the same.
My point is that this should be addressed head-on in sentencing, rather than by accounting. “Do the facts indicate that this defendant should be removed permanently from society?” Rather than “does the addition of all the sentence years, when calculated in a mechanical calculation, add up to more than this defendant’s probable life-span?”.
The mechanical rules, I understand, attempt to do this with rules concerning consecutive and concurrent sentences.
Your method only takes into account one of the purposes of the criminal justice system - protection of the public. What about deterrence and rehabilitation?
“Deterrence” is the same whether the sentence is “life in prision” or “411 years”, isn’t it? Who is going to be extra deterred by the threat of serving hundreds of years after he is dead?
“Rehabilitation” isn’t an issue for a guy sentenced to 411 years. He isn’t getting out into society again.
I understand where you’re coming from - this sentence, like other lengthy sentences imposed due to a whole mass of guilty verdicts (that guy who held three women captive in his house for a decade got approximately 1,000 years), amounts to a life sentence so why not just call it that?
I think it’s because none of the individual crimes carries a life sentence and our system doesn’t allow for a judge to say “While none of the things you did gets you life in jail, taken as a whole all of the things that you did indicate to me that you should spend the rest of your life in prison, so that’s your sentence”. What kind of guidelines would we need to put in place to ensure that this kind of assessment is made impartially and consistently? And as someone else noted earlier, what happens if on appeal some of the verdicts are overturned? Do you have to start sentencing over? How many counts would have to be somehow dismissed before the “life” sentence is reduced to X years?
So what we do instead is sentence people for the actual crimes they commit. Each one has a particular definition and sentencing guidelines and thus they can be handled independently. If something is overturned then it’s relatively simple to get rid of that sentence from the total.
I don’t think this is a bad way to handle it. It allows the criminal justice system to make the determination that you’re asking for - when someone does enough bad stuff they are going to jail for what works out to the rest of their life - while providing some rules for how this is handled. I think it makes it less likely that a judge will be capricious and avoids some appeals; anyone sentenced to life based on a whole bundle of lesser offences is going to argue that they weren’t treated fairly.
That’s just why I think the system is a bad idea. If someone committs, say, 100,000 counts of fraud under $500, each with a sentence of (say) 10 days (I’m just making this stuff up as an example), in theory this could net them a sentence of 2,740 years - putting them on par with the worst murderers and rapists.
Obviously, the system has methods of making this not happen (concurrent vs. consecutive sentences, etc.), but that strikes me as an overly- mechanical solution, bound to create injustice in certain cases. I would prefer the judgment of a judge over a purely mechanical accounting of charges - which strikes me as removing the discretion from the judge, who actually hears the evidence, and putting it in the hands of the persons drafting the legislation and the prosecutors, who have not.
I think it was noted but we all took very seriously that it is his right to not say a word and that cannot be held against him. It’s completely up to the prosecution to prove their case. That’s something that the judge and both attorneys stressed right at the start and I don’t think his lack of testimony played any part at all in our deliberations.