Hildegarde

A couple of days ago, a writer whose work I like very much posted a status saying that she had cursed somebody out on FB, and that she didn’t feel bad about it.  The was because the woman she had cursed out had declared herself in favor of a sentence that had been given to a 15 year old boy for stealing a few trinkets, a wallet and some pot from people at a party.

I am trying to be very careful  how I state this here, because that original status did not include much in the way of detail–not the charges, not the state, nothing.

The sentence, by the way, was a doozy–six life sentences, plus more, adding up to life plus 60 years.

The comments that followed this post were more or less expected–the declaration that no sentence like this would ever be given to a white teenager, who would have gotten “probation” instead, and all the rest of it.

But this story bothered me, and, I am happy to say bothered a number of other people as well, and eventually somebody posted a link to the full story.

I don’t know that this link is the same one, but it’s a good one. So you can go here to get the particulars:

http://hamptonroads.com/2013/11/life-times-six-how-travion-blount-got-118-years-and-6-life-sentences-robbery

As you can see, the story is far more complicated than it was first announced to be.

And, of course, I knew that from off. It is almost never the case that judges can hand out any sentence at all from 118 years to probation at their own discretion.

Judicial discretion in sentencing is limited by law and sometimes completely obviated by it–that’s what “mandatory minimums” are all about.

You don’t have to disagree with the contention hat there is something obscene about h anding a sentence of 118 years to a 15 year old for a robbery in which nobody was actually hurt to understand that what actually happened here had nothing to do with either racism or a bitch judge.

First, we’re talking about an armed robbery–it doesn’t matter what the worth of the loot is, if you bring a gun, even if you don’t use it, the sentencing guidelines start going through the roof.

I don’t know what this writer’s position is on gun control, but I do know that most of the people I know who are in favor of stringent gun control think that increasing sentences for use of a gun is a good thing.

Second, the robbery took place over twenty minutes and apparently scared the crap out of the victims.  In other words, the crime was not quite the same thing as just taking a few little bits and pieces.

As the story was originally told in the status, it sounded as if the kid has been a guest at the party, or a gate crasher, and had snuck around taking things.  

That was not what happened, and what did happen was considerably more serious.

Third, the kid was offered a plea bargain, which his two co-criminals and were also offered and which they accepted.

I have a lot of problems with the plea bargain system, especially when it concerns juveniles and near-juveniles, black or white.

Kids with broken families and few resources–white as well as black–are shoved into taken plea bargains for things they haven’t done, being advised that they’re likely to be convicted even if they’re not guilty, so they might as well get as little time as possible.

This case, however, is a prime example of what plea bargains are for, for a number of reasons.

a) the kid was guilty, and had pretty much admitted it.  He refused to take the plea bargain because he didn’t think he was guilty of “everything” they were charging him with.

b) the two other kids who had taken part in the robbery had both accepted plea bargains, and it’s guaranteed that part of the conditions for those bargains would be their willingness to testify against Travion Blount at trial

and, finally–drum roll, please–the BIG one

c) conviction for armed robbery in this state carried statutorially mandated life terms.

In other words, the people who were complaining about racist sentencing–saying that a white kid would have gotten much less in the way of jail time, or none at all–were wrong.

White or black, young or old, anybody tried and convicted as an adult of armed robbery would be stuck in the same place.

What bothers me about all this is that I can’ see the point of truncating the story to begin with.

There is nothing about the real incident that makes giving a 15 year old kid a 118 year sentence right, or even comprehensible. 

Sometimes you do see stories like this that have been truncated because not to truncate would be to make the sentence seem at least understandable–about twenty years ago there was a case in Chicago, I think, where three young girls were given life without parole for the murder of an elderly woman in their neighborhood.  The girls were black, the woman was white, and protests were lodged from Germany and France as well as the United States.

The protests stopped when the state released details of the crime and pictures from the crime scene–a bludgeoning death so brutal the victim’s face was unrecognizable as human, or even animal.

Nothing in this case was even remotely comparable.  No one was hurt during the robbery.  Not much was taken.  And the whole thing sounds like a trio of rank idiots on amateur night.

Travion Blount had the right to plea as he wanted to plea, but I think if I had been his lawyer, I’d have quit when he refused to take the bargain. 

That lawyer must have known what was inevitably going to happen here. 

And as far as I can tell, the lawyer did try to explain it to ravion Blount. 

There are issues here that need to be addressed.

One of them is the question of when we charge juvenile as adults.  I’m almost never happy with that one, but I do sort of get it when the crime is the kind of savagery evidences in the Chicago case.  With this one,  I can’t see the rationale.

The other is the extent to which we limit judicial discretion in sentencing.  I know there was a concern, for a while, over judges who gave minimal sentences for violent crimes, but there needs to be some mechanism to allow a judge to fix a situation like this.

And the situation needed fixing.

The governor of Virginia did reduce Travion Blount’s sentence, eventually–to 40 years, still a long hall.

I have no idea if that is “appropriate” or not in this case–no idea what else the kid may have done in his life, no idea if there are other issues here the news stories don’t make us aware of.

The governor is on record as saying he things the 40 year sentence is exactly what’s justified here.  The state attorney general and the original prosecutors are on record as saying that the original sentence should have stood.

But making an incident like this sound like something it’s not isn’t helping anybody on any side of this argument.