Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

I have a huge gripe with the sentencing system in America. Whenever a judge give a sentence to the criminal they say He/She will go to jail for a certain amount of Life Sentences or a certain amount of years past the human life expectancy. Can't they just say til death? It would make more sense to say til death not for 7 life sentences or for 1000 years? What are your thoughts?

I'm pretty sure they do that so they can't technically qualify for parole after like 20 years.

I think they do that so anything they can do for early release is meaningless

I would say that, except:
1) Things can happen to change your sentence length (this usually doesn't happen to people in this scenario, or at least, make them shorter)
2) It's kinda a rule of thumb way of figuring out "how bad" a person's crimes were when they're hard to grasp a quantitive understanding of them because they're so extreme. They found another stash of bodies from a convicted serial killer? That's another life sentence.

It's more down to the defendant receiving a sentence for each crime they have been charged with, simply because they may be found innocent for one crime and guilty of another, and they need to be sentanced according to the crime.

I believe it is done because if they are found not guilty for a specific crime they can have that sentence removed.

So a guy murders 3 people.
Police accuse him of killing 4

Get gets 4 life sentencings.
They later find out he only killed 3 people
One gets revoked meaning he now has 3 left to serve.

If they bundled them into one crime he would likely have to be retried for all of them. This prevents inmates from being set free for a specific time. Otherwise they might try to run.

When someone gets multiple life sentences, it means multiple sentences. If one of them gets overturned or reduced on appeal, the others remain in effect. Same for the "1000 years in prison," which is usually the result of dozens of sentences added together.