I do think he should serve time, at least 10 years, but not anywhere close to 35.
He’ll be eligible for parole at 17 and a half. Whether he gets it will depend on his behavior and how effective his representative is at the parole hearing.
Assuming good behavior, he won’t serve anywhere close to 35 years.
I suppose with that situation it seems more reasonable.
This is completely inconsistent with Texas law.
In Texas, all deliberate homicides are called “murder.”
“Manslaughter” is the act of causing a human being to die through reckless behaviour.
Most other places too I think? IANAL but long familiarity with the whodunit genre has conditioned me to think of intentional but unpremeditated heat-of-the-moment-type attacks as second-degree murder or similar.
I think part of the issue here is that Texas is unusual compared to most states. In Texas, juries can decide the prison sentence even in non‑capital felony cases like murder. In most of the country, juries only handle sentencing in death‑penalty trials; everything else is handled by judges.
Texas also tends to have longer prison sentences overall. Some of that comes from the state’s broader sentencing ranges, but some of it likely comes from the jury‑sentencing system itself. A jury that has never sentenced anyone before is more vulnerable to emotion in high‑intensity cases — like a student stabbing another student — than a judge who does this every day and has a sense of what typical sentences look like. So the combination of wide sentencing ranges and jury‑driven punishment probably contributed to Anthony’s long prison sentence.
And yes, part of this is simply Texas’s political culture, which historically favors tough sentencing. But jury sentencing adds an extra layer of unpredictability and emotional weight that most other states don’t have, and that may help explain why Texas outcomes often look more severe than the national norm.
Many other places have a version of manslaughter called voluntary manslaughter, in which killing is deliberate, but certain mitigating factors are deemed to be present. Texas has no such thing, although it does allow similar mitigating circumstances to be raised at sentencing for murder.