Quote Originally Posted by hollohas View Post
Yeah, committing 26 serious crimes including multiple homicides is worth a life sentence. There are no do overs. This wasn't a little screw up or victimless crime. It doesn't matter if he was scared or incompetent, he committed 26 serious crimes against real people and property. Requiring that he serve time for each of his crimes is not a malicious law.

Are you suggesting that people should be allowed to cause as much trouble as possible, hurt as many people as possible, kill as many people as possible and as long as their crimes are part of the same trial, they only do time for one of those crimes? Because that's what you're saying when you say the sentencing laws are malicious.

What's malicious is letting this guy off easy.
He had a series of cascading events which it is not clear he was trained in mitigating once it all went bad, or if he even knew or could read the runaway truck ramp sign, etc. I've read plenty of truckers' commentary on this, including those who drive that stretch weekly. From what I gather, all of their responses basically boil down to this: once the event started, he was screwed. It's not clear to me that his negligence extends beyond ignorance that lead to sheer terror and incompetent decision making once it went bad. If anyone here is a trucker w/ mountain experience, I'd be interested in hearing what someone of his training level could have done once the brakes failed, aside from crash.

Yes, I do believe consecutive sentencing is wrong when it essentially results in a life sentence, and even the judge agreed he thought the sentence was harsh but his hands were tied by the state laws. The dude was not high, drunk, and he cooperated post-crash. No criminal record, green card, barely spoke English.

Again, there are a lot of things I do not see clearly as proven which would make this a good sentence, and in light of that I simply must in conscience consider this sentence malicious. This was an emotionally charged, politically expedient case for the DA, much like the Rittenhouse trial and we saw how much BS took place in that.