Comment by palish
18 years ago
If all we're arguing about is the degree of the evidence... that's why we have juries.
The problem is that a judge must interpret a guilty verdict as an immutable fact, rather than as a decision made by emotional and fundamentally random human beings:
if conviction == guilty
decide a sentence based on the type of crime
Instead, a person's prison sentence should reflect how confident we are in the guilty verdict.
The jury was asked how confident they were. They had the option of returning not guilty, or even guilty of a lesser crime, such as manslaughter --- murder without intent.
You are obviously not as confident as the jury was. But you were not on the jury. The jury, given the facts of the case, appears to have been maximally confident about Reiser's culpability: they returned a verdict of premeditated malicious intentional murder, where they instead could have found that Reiser had accidentally killed Nina in the heat of a terrible argument.
At a certain point, you just have to let go of the fact that you disagree with the jury. Clearly, we cannot simply poll every person on the country as to what they thought of the case from afar.
> a person's prison sentence should reflect how confident we are in the guilty verdict.
That's a bad idea: if we accuse someone of some awful crime, and decide there's only 1/10 confidence in a guilty verdict, they should still serve a small fraction of the time? Someone's either guilty or not. If they are, there are sentencing guidelines that take various other factors into account.
I agree that, in general, a sentence shouldn't reflect confidence in the verdict. However, given that the US justice system has so many shades of each crime, it's actually not clear either that someone's either guilty or not... they might well be guilty of a lesser crime, which would approximate sentencing guidelines as preferred by grandparent.