Not changed by this ruling, but it strikes me as really odd that you can sentence someone to prison for that long, or that you would bother. Why not just say life in prison? If your state is 103 years old, saying anything about the next 1000 years seems ... lacking in credibility.
Soon local politicians will require you only to do 1% of jail time so you’ll be sentenced to a 100 years in jail for a misdemeanor. This already exists in the California bail system where you pay 1% of astronomically high bails (eg $60,000 bail for 1st time misdemeanor, like if they change a court date and fail to inform you).
According to Wikipedia[2], there are several countries where this is the case:
> In Europe, there are many countries where the law expressly provides for life sentences without the possibility of parole. These countries are England and Wales (within the United Kingdom), the Netherlands, Moldova, Bulgaria, Italy, Hungary, Austria, Malta, Cyprus, Albania, Ukraine and the Republic of Ireland.
This seems much clearer to me than a 200-year sentence which needs to undergo a calculation to get the actual sentence length.
As I understand it, the way trails are done are also a bit different: rather than "two counts of X", people are judged based on "did X two times". In other words, you don't get a separate conviction for both Xs. So if someone killed three people, they're judged based on killing three people, rather than based on every individual killing. In those cases someone can receive a life sentence, rather than "3x30=90 years" or some such.
[1]: Details in Dutch: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenslange_gevangenisstraf#Ne...
That's how you sentence someone for 141,078 years... (They served eight.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_prison_sentenc...
1. At 75 years of age, he will not live to be 175
2. The law dictates that the punishment per murder must be 50 years
3. He's been convicted of two murders, and must have both charges applied to him unless we are not to expect punishment for one of the victims.
Ergo, he must have a term much longer than his lifespan.
There are a thousand details I just skipped over (concurrent sentances, multiple crimes commited in the same act, stacking versus non-stacking offenses, etc) but this isn't unusual and is a perfectly rational and sane outcome.
Judges are elected officials, so sometimes they like to make a nice big show of giving out a 1000 year sentence to appease the masses, when "life in prison without parole" would have done the same job.
I dunno if I buy the "dehumanizing" argument, but I certainly think it's unnecessarily confusing.
- Sentencing to life without parole is considered inhumane - Criminal sentences should be proportional to the crime - Sentences are supermodular
Let's say there is a minimum sentence of two months for some insignificant crimes, start increasing the length for more serious ones. Most serious crimes usually involve several different crimes that are committed while committing the "main" component of the crime. So it starts adding up, and it starts adding up fast due to the supermodularity.
So even though the end result is seemingly absurd, trying to make it non-absurd would violate some of the most agreed-upon principles and here we are.
However, AFAIK, rape or even murder aren't federal crimes, unless the crime crossed state/tribal boundaries.
That was at issue in the case; the plaintiff was convicted by the state and argued that the state didn't have jurisdiction.