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UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Might also be worth noting that you rarely just get charged with the worst thing you did. We have so many laws and so many variations on what constitutes a crime. “Attempted Murder” becomes a litany of crimes depending on where you were standing, how you got there, what you were using to attempt the murder, who you were aiming at, why you wanted them dead, what you said and did before and after the crime, and what degree of collateral damage you inflicted along the way.

You could very easily face more time for attempted murder than actual murder, purely depending on how many charges the DA wanted to file against you.

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yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
That sounds pretty insane tbh

Over here in Germany and probably the entire EU punishments don’t stack.

If you commit multiple crimes doing a single act (e.g. in a bank robbery: violations of weapon law, trespassing, theft, threatening personnel, driving violations…) only the most severe one is prosecuted.

Multiple seperate crimes can stack but the punishment must be strictly less than the sum of punishments if they were prosecuted independently and must be less than 15 years (unless murder is involved).

There is no way in which you can get less time for murder than for attempted murder here.

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- UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  
  Over here in Germany and probably the entire EU punishments don’t stack.
  
  I mean, maybe that’s true. Idk. It’s definitely not how the American system operates. DAs have discretion in bringing charges and pushing for sentences. DA bias is, incidentally, a big reason for the racial/gender split in the prison population. The difference between involuntary manslaughter and capital murder is often what charge the DA chooses to bring.
  
  But the turn of phrase “to throw the book at them” comes from the strategy of prosecuting for every conceivable crime, rather than the singular obvious one.
  
  There is no way in which you can get less time for murder than for attempted murder here.
  
  There are drug crimes that carry a harsher sentence than some murder sentences. The “Three Strikes” rule, notable in California, is a similar source of life sentences for non-violent crimes.
  
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