Why are people sentenced to prison for terms longer than life? Albert Morake was sentenced to 1,535 years in prison. How can a person be sentenced to more than 1 life imprisonment?
Just to expand on what others have answered: It's important that each crime is also given its own sentence as it's possible that prisoners can be cleared of crimes if new evidence is found. This could make a significant difference to the amount of time the prisoner is serving. For example if a person was convicted for kidnap, murder, and stealing a car, all adding up to a total of 120 years, but later was found to be a car thief who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and proven innocent of the kidnap and murder charges, that person would then only face the sentence from the car theft. If one life sentence had been issued for the three crimes, a new sentence would have to be worked out.
This happened despite the fact that the marriage and Bible verses requirement were almost surely illegal and similar things have happened on and off, mostly in rural courts with non-attorney judges, for pretty much as long as the U.S. has been a country (and earlier). The trick is that the orders take effect unless someone appeals them, and since deals like this are usually a result of a plea bargain which waives rights to an appeal, and even if the result is simply imposed by the judge, one has to consider if taking the case up on appeal, having the sentence reversed, and then having it remanded to the same judge for resentencing would be worse from the perspective of the defendant, given the broad authority of a sentencing judge in a minor case like this one, than simply accepting the illegal sentence. Also, cases that aren't appealed never create precedents and aren't generally available among resources used by legal researchers, so they systemically evade documentation in easily available sources.
Is this unique to the USA, or now common elsewhere? No. It is common throughout the developed world. How long has this been done, as opposed to keeping all the inmates constantly locked in their own cells and only seeing each other when eating in a dedicated eating place or when brought outdoors once a day for an hour or so? Before the late 18th century, imprisonment was not a punishment - it was a place where you were held while awaiting trial or punishment: execution, corporal punishment, humiliation or transportation. However, it was not uncommon for prisoners who had been acquitted to still be held because they couldn't pay the cost of their pre-trial imprisonment. The 1779 Penitentiary Act introduced solitary confinement, religious instruction, and a labour regime. These types of prisons were not actually built until the 19th century and saw increasing use as the death penalty became applicable to fewer and fewer crimes. These types of prisons spread across the western world and it is this 100+-year-old image that you are thinking of. However, for some reason, solitary confinement and individual prayer seemed to cause no improvement in the moral state of prisoners. Therefore, since the early 20th (yes, 20th) century most prisons had communal mess halls and recreation yards for use on the weekend. In most, prisoners worked during the week, around the prison or outside in things like quarries and road construction. Starting in the late 20th century &quot;hard labour&quot; was largely done away with and prisoners were offered work or education opportunities. They were confined to their cells at night in medium-security and higher-level prisons but low-security prisons often work on an honour system and cells are not locked. Developments such as day-release and weekend detention have influenced prisons. Many northern European countries have literally open prisons where you are free to come and go so long as you spend the nights there. Only the worst of the worst are kept in super-max prisons and only the worst of them are kept to their cells and isolated from the rest of the prison population. Those are the people who get 1 hours recreation only. That said, prisoners have rights and their physical and psychological well-being are the responsibility of the State. Doctors and psychologists examine prisoners and balance risks to society against the rights of the prisoner. I've worked inside super-max prisons as a contractor and they are bleak and scary places but most inmates are free to roam around the grounds and other common spaces. I've also worked in low-security prisons and they are very different - still not nice places but spartanly comfortable. If you get sent to such a prison, can you choose to get a normal cell if you don't want anything to do with these violent, crazy people? Or are you forced to endure that living nightmare and constantly be on guard? You're a prisoner. One of your punishments is having your freedom of choice taken away from you. The system will tell you where you sleep, where you eat, where you can go and when you can go there. If you are a &quot;violent, crazy&quot; person then you will be in a super-max prison with other &quot;violent, crazy people&quot;. If you are a white-collar criminal, you won't be.
Generally not. A judge in sentencing has a number of options subject to the statute or common law. A fine may be one option, imprisonment another. Others include community service, a suspended sentence or death. What they choose is (subject to appeal or commutation) what you do. You can't substitute one for the other.
As a preliminary note, the mandate that “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted” can be interpreted two ways, (a) prohibiting punishments which are cruel as well as those which are unusual, or (b) prohibiting just those which are both cruel and unusual. The courts have not interpreted this to have meaning (b), even though "cruel and unusual" is a fixed phrase repeated in court rulings. In various cases where the "cruel and unusual" clause is invoked, e.g. Solem v. Helm, 463 U.S. 277, Weems v. United States, 217 U.S. 349, Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660, Lockyer v. Andrade, 538 U.S. 63 the courts consistently analyze the punishment in terms of being jointly "cruel and unusual", and never consider the possibility that a punishment might be cruel but usual, or unusual but not cruel. The prohibition derives from the pre-American "cruell and unusuall Punishments" provision of the English Declaration of Rights, analyzed in Harmelin v. Michigan, 501 U.S. 957, which provides "[t]hat excessive Baile ought not to be required nor excessive Fines imposed nor cruell and unusuall Punishments inflicted". The court observes that cruel punishments can indeed be quite common, for example But the vicious punishments for treason decreed in the Bloody Assizes (drawing and quartering, burning of women felons, beheading, disembowling, etc.) were common in that period -- indeed, they were specifically authorized by law, and remained so for many years afterwards. The court concludes from its historical analysis that "unusual(l)" in the context of English common law really means "illegal", i.e. "contrary to Law and ancient practice," without "Precedents" or "express Law to warrant," "unusual," "illegal," or imposed by "Pretence to a discretionary Power."
Was This An Egregiously Lenient Sentence? Yes. Did he get lighter punishment than he &quot;should have&quot; (in some sense)? Yes. A six month sentence for a non-negligent homicide was virtually unprecedented then and remains extremely low. Even a six month sentence for the rape of an adult woman (which is generally a comparable or less serious offense than manslaughter) by a privileged white offender generates immense controversy today as it did in the case of the sentencing of Brock Turner for that offense in 2016 (something that ultimately cost the judge imposing that sentence his job). There is no way that intentionally hitting someone is negligent homicide. It is at a minimum reckless, and honestly, is hard to see as anything other than intentional conduct. While it wasn't premeditated and hence wouldn't qualify as first degree murder eligible for the death penalty, this would be a fairly straightforward case for a second degree murder charge and a sentence of a decade or more. The intentional part apples to the act of hitting someone, not the result of causing their death. This intent was present here. Where Did The System Fail? in what way did the legal process fail? Or do you think that there was any failure at all in the legal process? Was the substantive law at fault? No. The substantive criminal law in 1963 was very similar to what it is now and would have authorized a much more severe sentence on the crime of conviction and would have made a more serious charge of murder viable. Arguably the substantive law should have had a mandatory minimum sentence for homicide, but since judges very rarely impose such lenient charges for homicide in cases like this one where there was no good reason for leniency, many states don't do that now and it isn't a problem that legislators would reasonably have believed that they had to worry about. Allowing leniency in some extraordinary cases that capture considerations that the law does not expressly mention is often a good thing, rather than a bad one. Did The Appellate Process Fail? No. The defendant's conviction was not wrongfully reversed on appeal, and it is generally not possible for a defendant's sentence to be increased on appeal in these circumstances. Arguably, this is not an ideal rule of law (and it is not the law in most countries in these circumstances). But this was not a major problem with the legal system that was a primary reason causing the outcome in this case to be an exceptional miscarriage of justice. The Judge's Sentence Was An Abuse Of Discretion. The judge imposed a very light sentence within the statutorily allowed range of discretion. While we can't literally read the mind of the judge and the judge doesn't acknowledge this as a basis for the sentence, given a larger pattern of similarly lenient sentences of similarly situated people given light sentences by judges, we can make a very reasonable guess about the most likely and plausible reason for the lenient sentence. The most likely and plausible reason for the sentence is the one identified by Bob Dylan. A high status white man killed a low status black woman, and the judge felt that, as a result, it didn't justify as serious of a sentence. The actual chain of reasoning in the judge's mind consciously may have involved considerations like the view that the victim was an &quot;eggshell&quot; victim, and the likelihood that the defendant was capable of reforming his conduct after a short sentence and thus didn't present a threat to the public. But the courts very rarely grant leniency to someone on the grounds that the victim was &quot;fragile&quot; - usually this justifies a more severe sentence. And the documented fact that the perpetrator routinely assaulted others with his cane casts grave doubt on the extent to which he could be rehabilitated more easily than a typical defendant. Also, even if the charge of conviction was manslaughter, this case would have been considered at the high end of the range in terms of the culpability of the offender who went around assaulting many people at a public gathering seriously enough to cause harm, and to in one case cause a death of a more fragile victim. The sentence should have been at least at the midpoint of what is allowed (currently about five years out of ten possible) in a case like this one. Further, while Maryland is not in the &quot;Deep South&quot; it is a Southern state with a history of slavery and Jim Crow discrimination, and the judge in this case would have lived under and seen enforced to his benefit, Jim Crow laws in Maryland during his lifetime. The Civil Rights movement had not succeeded to the point that racism was a completely disavowed and unacceptable form of motivation in 1963, particularly in even parts of the South outside of the &quot;Deep South&quot; at that time. As a reference point, President Biden, in nearby Delaware, was starting to make a name for himself in politics at the time as a defender of segregation in the school system and an opponent of busing to desegregate schools. This issue got him elected and re-elected. Biden reformed his views later, but racism was alive and well in Chesapeake Bay area at the time. Was Prosecutorial Discretion An Issue? Possibly To Some Extent. The prosecution's decision to press charges for manslaughter rather than murder was also questionable, but less obviously so. Today, common practice would be to bring both murder and manslaughter charges in a case like this one. The facts would have supported a second degree murder charge. The fact that the prosecution originally brought a murder charge suggests that it knew that the facts supported that charge, and was influenced by some political or tactical consideration, or by judicial pressure, to drop the more serious charge before trial. But without insight into what that reason was (which is much less obvious than the judge's motivations) it is hard to judge whether the prosecutor should have acted differently under the circumstances. The fact that the prosecution pressed charges, took the case to trial, and got a conviction at all also suggests that the prosecutor's conduct was not at the bottom of the barrel compared to more racist prosecutor exercises of discretion in 1963 elsewhere in the U.S. The prosecutor had the full legal ability to decline to press charges at all without facing any legal consequences for failing to do so. Further, while it is certainly plausible that prosecutor's racism figured into this decision, it is also important to note that the prosecutor has to consider the attitudes of a likely jury pool when bringing charges. Even if the prosecutor believes that the defendant is guilty of murder under the law, the prosecutor has to consider whether the odds of getting a conviction from a local jury that is likely to have considerable racial bias influences what charges are right to bring in order to get a maximum conviction, as opposed to what charges the prosecutor believes are legally justified. Likewise, if the judge indicated the he would be likely to dismiss the murder charge before trial in a preliminary hearing, that would also make a prosecutor's decision to comply with an implicit judicial suggestion to stay in the judge's good graces for the remainder of this case, and for future cases before the same judge, understandable. However, if electoral public pressure, or the defense counsel's pressure or influence, caused the prosecutor to give up on a murder charge that a conviction would probably have been secured upon, this is much more problematic and would suggest racial and status bias on the part of the prosecuting attorney's office. Was Jury Conduct An Issue? No. The conduct of the jury in this case was not an issue, even though the potential of jury nullification that didn't happen was a factor that may have influenced the charge brought by the prosecution. The jury convicted the defendant on the most serious charge presented to it.
A punishment is basically a harm to someone's person, liberty, dignity, or property imposed primarily for the purpose of harming someone, rather than to accomplish some non-punitive end such as apprehending a suspected criminal, securing compliance with a court order, exchanging truthful facts, or compensating someone for harm legally attributable to the person upon whom the act is imposed. If a police officer shoots and kills a person while they are in the process of committing a crime, that is not a punishment, because the officer is not trying to punish someone for committing the crime, but to prevent the crime from continuing and/or to apprehend the suspect. If the use of force is justified by a law authorizing it under the circumstances, then it is legal and there are no civil or criminal consequences. If the use of force is not justified by a law authorizing it under the circumstances it might be a crime, it might be a &quot;tort&quot; (i.e. a civil wrong for which you can sue someone, especially if it arises at common law), or it might be a civil rights violation. Law enforcement officers generally have broad absolute immunity from common law tort liability incurred the course of their duties in carrying out their jobs, and have &quot;qualified immunity&quot; from liability for civil rights violations which limits their liability to cases of intentional violations of clearly established constitutional rights. In a case arising from an excessive use of force against someone who is not in custody, generally speaking, the constitutional right violated is the 4th Amendment right to be free of unreasonable seizures and to be free from seizures that that are not supported by probable cause. Generally speaking, the law does not recognize an excessive use of force in connection with the criminal justice system as a &quot;taking&quot; for which there is a right to both due process and fair market value compensation (to somewhat oversimplify). Generally speaking, an 8th Amendment analysis involving the use of force (as opposed to taking of money or property in the criminal justice system which are subject to the excessive fines clause of the Bill of Rights), begins, and the 4th Amendment seizure analysis ends, when someone is in custody. A police officer who arrests someone and then beats them up or rapes them and then releases them, might be entering into 8th Amendment, rather than 4th Amendment territory, although the dividing lines are not always clear.
Murder Which is the unlawful taking of a life with intent to do so. However, the doctrine of self-defence can make killing lawful: A person may use such force as is reasonable in the circumstances in the prevention of crime, or in effecting or assisting in the lawful arrest of offenders or suspected offenders or of persons unlawfully at large. if the prosecutor is of the opinion that the force used "is reasonable in the circumstances" they may not lay charges. If they do lay charges the judge may decide that there is no case to answer before going to trial if self-defence applies. If there is a trial this will probably be the strategy the defence employs and they may or may not be successful. If convicted the penalty is life imprisonment. Also, there is no UK law: there is the law of England and Wales, the law of Scotland and the law of Northern Ireland.