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Or someone can just skip prison and become leader of the country instead ahem USA ahem
I'm not deep into this situation but my understanding is that no minimum sentence would have helped there. Nobody being above the law might have helped...
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What about unjustly light sentences though? Like a sex criminal who is let off easy because he's white, has rich parents and was on track to get a high paying career?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Then the prosecution brings case law where a person of color in a similar situation got a very different sentence, or someone without the rich parents etc.
I'm sure there'll be biases but minimum sentences won't undo those. I'd find minimum and maximum sentences very unfair for situations like described by the person you replied to. Case law and perhaps a blinding system (Justice is blindfolded after all) where at least one of the judges involved doesn't get to learn things like "white guy with rich parents" might be a better solution if that's the problem this is intended to solve
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Minimums help the judges not only to decide the punishment, also to see in advance which crime is worse than the other crime. Maximums could maybe help in a similar way.
Maximums are needed when stark punishments exist, like torture, death penalty or removing of body parts. These can be limited to specific crimes then.
I would expect that judges have a fine moral compass for which crimes are worse than others. Better if they don't need to follow some administration's counterscientific "tough on crime" whim
You make a compelling case for maximums though. I hadn't thought of it as being a way to reduce torture or death penalty in the countries where that's on the table in the first place