I didn’t believe this when I heard it on the news, and I still don’t believe the story in our local newspaper. The sentence for the two people who set the Seton Hall Fire, the worst dorm fire in history, killing three people, is five years with parole in 17 months.
How cheap is human life sometimes.
I wasn’t living in the US when this happened, so i’d never heard of it before.
That does seem a light sentence, considering the circumstances described in your link.
Even if the fire was an accident or a prank that got out of control, i think that there are some things so stupid that the death of other people is a reasonably-foreseeable consequence of the act, and the act should be punished accordingly.
The problem the prosecutors had was a serious lack of evidence. The whole case was built of circumstantial evidence along with unclear statements found on phone conversations after the police focused on the duo and got wiretap permissions on family phones.
I would guess that the prosecutor did not want to have spent six years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on a case only to watch the pair walk free if the defense was able to cast “reasonable doubt” on the claims for the prosecution.
From this earlier story, here were the possible charges related to the arson. (There were additional charges related to obstruction.):
This story from 2003 notes the difficulty of even building the case. (Later stories note that the defense moved to have the trial thrown out for improper behavior by the prosecutor even years before it came to trial–a move that was denied by the state Supreme Court.)
I have a tiny bit of sympathy (not much) for the original actions of a couple of scared kids who fled the scene. I have nothing but contempt for the young men who continued to deny any involvement right up until the point where they were actually going to have to go to trial.