True.
Surely this is symbolic. It is an attempt to appese the mob howling for his blood. (And, if we are talking about an elected judge here, an attempt to attract votes.)
One addition may be when a thug thinks — or pretends to think after — that you were guilty of an offence against his kin, or something. Just looking up the curious American phrase, ‘Take your beating like a man’, I came across this hideous murder in a cell, without possibility of retreat or help, in famed Mountjoy, Ireland; where it is a pity the victim of the beating wasn’t armed up; although that would be an offence inside.
Victim told to take his beating like a man and not to scream
The murderer claims to have given the beating under the delusion that the victim raped his mother; and claims leniency because he was deluded: However he said he had “supernatural strength” and the digs, kicks and stamps were obviously “a bit too hard” because he hadn’t intended to kill him. “No one deserves to die in Mountjoy,” he said, indicating that he would therefore plead guilty to manslaughter or assault, but not murder.
The logic of a thug is impeccable. Somehow, even when they honestly acknowledge guilt, they were still justified.
Plus the dancing on the victim’s head afterwards.
No doubt the right (or is it duty?) of inmates to carry firearms will be the subject of the NRA’s next campaign.
No. He can always claim that he was coerced into his plea. The judge will ask him a thousand times (in different ways) if his plea was voluntary, but he can always claim at a later date that someone forced him into it.
And it makes sense. If a person has a gun to your head, can you write a statement that no gun was held to your head and make it valid and unavailable for review?
Cryogenics couild play a part here. On the one hand, the convict could elect to be frozen, like Ted Williams, so he can be brought back to life by some future bio-tech breakthrough. However, on the other hand, the court is now in a position to throw him back into the clink if he gets thawed out before 3012.
But one has to wonder why they don’t just say “life plus a trillion years”, although I suppose then they wold be toying with “cruel and unusual”.
Very true, but that’s why you give him 1,000 years. Say one day a court decides that a couple of the charges weren’t proper. Now he has 800 years in prison.
If you keep the sentences realistic and say, “Well, 100 years is more than enough. Let’s leave it at that.” then if a couple of charges get tossed maybe his sentence is now 20 years and he will be out before he dies.
When I see charges like this I like to imagine what it would be like for somebody who had just completed the same sentence and was due to be released. In this case, let’s say Castro will serve 1030 years -1000 years+ 30 years for his natural life. That would mean somebody with the same sentence started serving in 983 AD. Think about that for a moment. In the 980’s Erik the Red had just discovered Greenland! America wasn’t even in anybody’s imagination yet (at least not in Europe)!. Dublin Ireland was also founded in the 980’s. Just think of the changes the world has made in those short 1030 years and imagine the world Arial Castro will face when he’s released in 3043. The world he’ll face will be so different from today we can’t even begin to fathom the changes he’ll see. One can only hope he’ll die before his sentence is finished rather than face a new life in such an alien world.
Really? As “unjust” as being raped for 10 years?
Sorry to bump this, but I had a conversation with a friend yesterday who is a former District Attorney, and asked her this question. She said that if the charges had mandatory sentence enhancers built into the statutes, the judge would not have the freedom to NOT tack on those sentence enhancers. So, if Castro was charged with, say, 500 rapes, and the type of rape he was charged with contained a mandatory sentence enhancer (say, “rape with depraved indifference” or something), the judge was required to include those enhanced sentences.
The above is my non-legal paraphrasing of her legal explanation.
So, in addition to perhaps wanting to make a statement about the crime itself, the judge might also be simply following the statutes that mandate particular sentences for particular crimes.
What if he was sentenced to 100 years.
Then he appeals and has 100 charges overturned.
SO he says 'well each charge should have been worth 2 years in jail,… so 100 - 2 *100 = - 100 . You actually owe me 100 years ‘get out of jail free’
Its a bit of a rare case, but they are saying he can’t serve the sentence for his charges concurrently. He didn’t do it all in a madness induced spree, he had 10 years of being sane to consider his next action… So he is serving the sentences consecutively. (thats my main contribution … that they aren’t going to treat these sentences as concurrent !)
With consecutive serving of sentences, then the sentences have to sum up to the total… and individual sentences have to have non-zero sentences , so that they sum comes to final sentence.
The 1000 years is to ensure that each charge had a significant sentence attached to it. So that even if many chargers are overturned, then the sentence can be reduced …and still not get down to less than life in jail.