FWIW, the rest of the world considers prison sentences in the US to be absurdly long. This guy apparently got 10 years for hacking; in much of Europe, you'd get less than that for murder.
Committing naughtiness level 5 on a scale of 1 to 10 crime in "EU" and in "USA" and you'll get a punishment of X years for a level 5 conviction in EU. In the USA you'll get a plea bargain offer of X years for agreeing to be guilty of a level 3 crime, or you can take your chances at a trial for a level 5 crime (with admittedly draconian punishment). About 90% to 98% of criminals take the plea.
The widely advertised injustice is that on paper, a level 5 crime in EU has the same punishment as a level 3 crime in the USA so the USA is draconian.
The actual real world injustice is if you're innocent and demand your right to trial, we give level 8 punishments for level 5 crimes to encourage guilty pleas and "save money". Because we value saving money over justice and fairness. Or maybe we take a weird statistical approach to injustice; yeah it would suck to do time for a level 5 crime but a level 1 punishment might not be worth the 10% odds of success.
This has a weird and horrible interaction with mandatory minimum sentences. Without mandatory mins, "yeah he probably didn't do it but he's pleading out to a lessor charge" can result in a very fair punishment like mere probation. But with mandatory mins you have to throw the guy in the slammer for decades or let him walk and thats kinda messy. OR being messy, does it encourage higher levels of care and research?
If you commit involuntary manslaughter in Germany, like in a fight in a bar off an army base like a case I know of (I'm not even tangentially involved in other than being in the Army at the same time), yeah, you'll get like 3 years at most. And if you get convicted of manslaughter in the USA you'll get like 8 or so years. That seems terrible.
The difference is you get convicted of manslaughter in the USA by doing actual first degree intentional homicide and its plea'd down to involuntary manslaughter. In Germany the laws are different but vaguely comparable to first degree would get you 15 years minimum, which is actually more draconian than the punishment you'd likely get in the USA due to overcrowding.
Shouldn't that be 90 to 98% of charged suspects? The incentive to take the plea deal exists whether the suspect is actually guilty or not.
Both of those things are problematic, IMHO.
As for US sentences being absurdly long, I attribute that to the privatized (profit-incentivized) prison system here. Abolishing that concept would be a good starting point, I think, because it would eliminate a very large chunk of the humanitarian problems in one fell swoop. Then we can work on the rest, starting with the perverse incentives of the legal system itself.
I think it would be pretty naive to assume that private actors can have no influence over an unelected/appointed judiciary anyway, but don't forget that many places in the United States have an elected judiciary that needs to campaign every few years to maintain their status, which clearly opens them up to influence by those prisons.
All prisons are required to maintain a certain minimum population to justify their operating budget.
At any rate the entire debate of public versus private prisons is laughably flawed because even public prisons are reliant upon commercial service vendors that cater specifically to the prison industry at ludicrously inflated rates to both inmates and tax payers. And both prison types are known to make use of inmates as cheap commercial labor which undervalues the inmates and robs the local economy of manual labor jobs.
It's not vague at all. Private prisons lobby for mandatory minimums. Mandatory minimums remove sentencing power from the judge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_sentencing
The older system you describe is called discretionary sentencing, it is a dissipating vestige of the era before private prisons.
The prison guards union is an incredibly powerful lobbying force, which has successfully increased prison sentences for many crimes, blocked efforts to decriminalize marijuana, made more mandatory sentences, etc. Whether those guards work in the 92% of prisons which are government run or the 8% which are privately run makes no difference.
The fully privatized prisons are on a whole other level of messed up.
Times of Israel:
"The binary options industry, which is estimated to have employed more than 10,000 people, was outlawed by the Knesset in October 2017 largely as a result of The Times of Israel’s reporting, beginning with a March 2016 article entitled “The Wolves of Tel Aviv.”"
"But the industry has not gone away. Many of its operatives have reinvented themselves as “blockchain,” “fintech,” or “cannabis” entrepreneurs, while some of the call centers offering fraudulent investments have moved abroad and now offer fraudulent forex, cryptocurrencies or other investments from such cities as Kyiv, Sofia and Tbilisi."
"The binary options industry operated in Israel with impunity for a decade, stealing billions of dollars from millions of people around the world. While US law enforcement continues to tackle the fraud, and has convicted several Israelis and indicted others, Israel has yet to prosecute any of its orchestrators or operatives."
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/dont-let-israel-become-the-pro...
[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels...
Citation needed.
In Germany the translation of murder has VERY specific legal requirements, like detailed planning beforhand, and evil action (cannibalism, sexual intent, terrorism, type stuff). You pretty much have to be a stereotypical serial killer or terrorist in Germany to commit the legal definition of murder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_German_law#Penalties
In the USA, colloquially speaking, not legally speaking, George Floyd was murdered. But in Germany what happened would seem to meet the equivalent of what Americans would call involuntary manslaughter. Clearly, the cops killed that dude while trying to do something vaguely reminiscent of their job, but also clearly, they did not stalk him with evil intent with an intentional plan for a long time and then cannibalize or sexually molest his body as would be required by the legal definition in Germany. Probably.
Historically, in Germany, involuntary manslaughter such as two idiot soldiers who don't know each other getting into a drunken bar fight over nothing while one had an undiagnosed brain anuresm that burst during or shortly after the fight will only get like three year sentence and who knows how early of a release. In America that event would colloquially be called "murder", because one person killed another person, but not so much from a strictly legal perspective in Germany.
It occurred in Minnesota, which is one of the handful of states with "third-degree murder", which this does appear to fall under.
One of the things that separates third-degree murder from manslaughter is the use of inherently dangerous acts, such as kneeling on his neck.
That very much depends on what kind of murder.