Comment by davidw
18 years ago
> 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.