To every Judge who has ever sentenced someone to life in prison, especially in Florida when the defendant was charged with first degree murder and the jury found him guilty of second degree murder.
“To serve a life without parole sentence is to observe your soul slowly ebb away, drip by drip, until the body becomes nothing but a living, functional casket of humanity. Death of the spirit occurs many, many years before the actual sentence is completed.” –Nathaniel Butler
Why don’t we ever talk about the second-degree murder trap? It’s less serious than first degree murder, and yet for most of the crimes/sentences, the punishment is the same. Charged with first degree murder with a firearm. Jury comes back second-degree murder. Sentence is the same. Doesn’t make sense if you are from outside the criminal justice system.
Isn’t it time we stopped running criminal justice based on a reaction to some 1970’s movies hyper-sensationalizing some rare cases where a person was released from prison and re-offended? You can trace all our minimum mandatory laws to the 1970-80’s fictional accounts of people getting released from prison and re-offending.
And while we are at it, how about when the Judge LIES to the jury and tells them that sentencing is exclusively her decision, when in a minimum mandatory prison sentence case the judge has NO discretion whatsoever. The sentence is wholly dependent on what the jury does.