THREAD: A young trucker whose brakes failed before a crash that killed 4 people just got sentenced to 110 years in prison--mandatory death in prison for a crash he didn't intend. There are several very important and hidden things going:
First, a great irony of US law is that it purports to set a high standard of evidence (beyond a reasonable doubt) to convict a person, but it allows human caging of millions without a shred of evidence that *the sentence* does any good.
In fact, most sentencing in U.S. is unconstitutional. Constitution requires judges to apply strict scrutiny when a "fundamental right" is taken away, and bodily liberty is such a right. This means sentence must be as narrowly tailored as possible to serve a compelling interest.
One of the great scandals of modern U.S. legal system is that **no U.S. court opinion has ever meaningfully reconciled this basic tension between the Constitution and mass human caging.** I wrote about it in my book Usual Cruelty and here: yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-puni…
Second, sentences like mandatory 110 years for this traffic crash reflect a deep pathology in U.S. system to try to blame "bad people" when harm happens. This is by design. It's profitable to people who control *systems* of harm to get us blaming individuals for mass social harm.
Third, the prosecutor hit him with mandatory 110 years in prison--sent him to die in a cage as an old man--b/c he didn't want to plead guilty. He exercised his right to a jury trial, the prosecutor **hid the sentence** from the jury.
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1472566054257897478
Finally, left out of almost every article on these cases is what going to prison means in our society: rampant sexual assault, infectious disease, never hugging your family, scandalous lack of medical care, pervasive physical beatings, and torture of solitary confinement.
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