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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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Bad drivers need harsher punishments if you ask me.
17 years is a seriously life-altering prison sentence sentence.
Quite frankly, this flavor of irresponsibility can be corrected in just a few years time, you just need a justice system that's interested in correction rather than punishment.
Kinda hard to accomplish when you have people cheering from the sidelines for more punishment...
I get it, but also when I think about if that happened to my sister, let alone my child, no amount of time would be enough. 2 years for ripping two people out of your life feels like a pittance. How do you separate the emotion from the practicality?
With all due respect, the justice system shouldn't exist for you to experience vengeance. It's easy to get angry and to wish harm against people who would hurt our loved ones, but at scale we just end up with a punitive justice system that begets even more violence and misery.
If a person can be reformed after committing a profound injustice to the point where we can trust that they won't repeat their crimes, why would we want their sentence to be lengthy and cruel when it could instead be compassionate and effective?
Forgiveness is a powerful thing. If you can't even think of forgiving this hypothetical transgression you've come up with, how can you ever hope to have a positive influence on this world that might actually protect others from the kind of tragedy you've described?
Not vengeance but justice. 2 years in prison then off you go is not justice. Now two years and 15 years paying support to the family you have wronged can be justice.
But just two years till you're good is not how it's supposed to work. There needs to be consequences otherwise there is no difference between somone going into rehab voluntarily for two years and somone killing two people and then being forced to go to rehab.
How do you know when a person is reformed versus playing the part to get out earlier? Is there a risk of the system being abused by those who commit a crime knowing that they can get out in a couple years' time?
I'm sorry but I'm not sure I see the connection here. How does forgiveness prevent such tragedies?
Which is why we don’t come up with our own punishments.
People shouldn't be locked in cages just because of someone's emotions.
I don't know that emotion is so easily divorced from justice. How do you define what a just punishment is for a crime? Or does the magnitude of the crime not matter?
We learn over and over again from our various texts-of-wisdom, be it fables or scripture or novels or movies, that revenge is a primitive response to problems. It's the moral of so many stories, right?
Yet we organize society to satisfy these immature desires. Punishment, for the most part, is neither deterrent nor corrective, and a paltry form of redress.
Do you want justice? Start with redress. You can't fix the problem of a dead child but the victims need proper support, to alleviate all the other issues caused by the crime. In Canada the prison system is called "corrections" but it mostly fails at that... rehabilitation requires an evidence-based system to succeed, and ours is built on punishment, an emotional response.
If you want deterrence, well that requires eliminating poverty and supplying real education, backed by proactive and robust mental health services.
I define justice as the best possible outcome of a bad situation.
So the crime committed and the effect on the victims, if any, doesn't affect the sentencing?
Uh, sure it does, in the sense that if someone is unable to be rehabilitated, they should be kept away from the public? Not sure what you're asking except maybe "can I please just have a little revenge?"
I'm confused on how you quantify rehabilitation. How do you know someone has changed?
And yeah I guess I'm genuinely having trouble wrapping my head around the idea that first degree murder and shoplifting could result in the same sentence.
Why would they result in the same sentence? That's a strange proposal that I have never heard before.
Regarding rehab, well that's a procedural question more than legislative. Ask experts in the field. It's not like the problem is new, even if it's evident we are going about it fundamentally wrong.
Now I'm confused, I thought the premise of this thread is that jail time should be based not on the severity of the crime, but only how long it takes to rehabilitate the offender. Did I misunderstand that?
Yeah I was pointing out that the prison system may be completely ineffective where it's based on punishment. It's a critical view, not prescriptive, and designing a new system requires a revolutionary approach, with consideration for the needs of the victims as well as the mental state of the perpetrators.
I wasn't proposing anything pat and simple like one-size-fits-all incarceration, completely the opposite, actually. Maybe forever in prison, maybe no jail time. Justice, in terms of repairing things for a victim, might mean a lifelong burden for the convicted, or something else entirely. It would necessarily be complex. More emotional, less rational people would have a problem with that since they can't see justice without punishment.
There is no harsher punishment than this. It's literally 1/4th of your life gone. Getting out of prison after this time and realizing what you lost and you got nothing - no friends, no family (probably), no relationships - must be soul crushing.
I'd rather die honestly.
This might qualify as murder in Germany, especially the "did not brake" part: It's not necessary to have intent to kill someone, it is only necessary to willingly hazard the consequences. That's how those street racers got convicted of murder.
OTOH that's the kind of murder that gives you a life-long sentence where parole after just the minimum time (15 years) is definitely not just on the table but the norm.
"life-long" in Germany is 25 years, normally with the option for parole after 15. However there is "Sicherheitsverwahrung", which doesn't count as punishment but is instead justified with protecting the rest of the public from a certain person, and can be applied indefinitely.
The average imprisonment for life-long is 25 years. There's no actual corresponding timed-sentence for lifelong as that is in fact technically lifelong, though with constitutional guarantee to have a chance at resocialisation. And § 66 StGB is most certainly not applicable to this kind of manslaughter. The dangerous part - recklessly driving a vehicle - can be mitigated by revoking and blocking the driving licence
Dangerous Offender status is what they call it in Canada. It's reserved for the confirmed sociopaths.
Murder in germany requires intent and malice. Neither is given here.
Dolus eventualis aka Eventualvorsatz, which can indeed be summed up as "willingly hazarding the consequences". AFAIU in English that's not a type of intent but recklessness. It certainly is not intent to kill someone, just intent to not give a fuck whether someone dies, there's a difference there.
Trying to sum up the stuff that distinguishes Totschlag from Mord with "malice" is also rather... vague. The key factor in this case (or at least the aspect that's easiest to establish) is killing by using means that are a danger to public safety, to wit, a car going 226km/h. Certainly doesn't fit the dictionary definition of "malice".
That's why it's not murder in this case.
Murder would be if I kill you for your car, as an example. Or a child killing his parents for faster inheritance. In Germany, we'd call these "niederer Beweggrund", so ... "Greed-based motive"? Idk how to properly translate it.
In this case, its definitely no murder tho because neither of the three characteristics for murder are given.
"niederer Beweggrund" would be "base motive", Habgier is greed. And they're only one possible way to qualify murder. As I emphasised there, using means that are a danger to public safety is another.
17 years is harsh but fair. Anything beyond that is just punitive.
Americans are in a very weird bubble when it comes to punishment/correction compared to most of the developed world and they don't seem to notice it.
Insane punishments, death penalty, imprisoning drug users, imprisoning sex workers, private prisons, normalized prison violence/sex violence. It's bonkers.
Wouldn't be a Lemmy post if it weren't for someone shitting on America or Americans even when the story has nothing to do with America.
It was a response to a comment asking for harsher punishment. And that sort of comment tends to pop up in most discussions involving somewhat reasonable punishments being mentioned.
Punishments in the US tend to be excessive though and people in the US somehow normalized it.
As an American I completely agree. People lose sight of just how much time the amount of years actually can be, and just want to feel better about punishing bad people.
Most people who do something like this will live with the guilt for their entire lives. It will always come up in job interviews, it will hurt their social situations. Nightmares forever. But we just have to pile even more shit on so that the rest of us can ride the high horse.
And before anyone shows up, no, getting a longer or shorter prison sentence does nothing for the victim. They're already in as bad of a spot as they could be.
Which has precisely zero to do with the submission.
I mean, 17 years for a car accident, drunk or not, is completely draconian. Murderers and child rapists regularly get lesser sentences, and their crimes were malicious not negligent.
There's no benefit to society to lock anyone up that long for something that can be corrected with a compassionate justice system. If we can release them with confidence that they won't make the same reckless decisions again, is there any point to locking them up for that long other than to make them suffer?
Ironic considering in the USA this person would likely have a much more linent sentence for this specific crime