fwa has extremely tough sentencing laws. malice murder and felony murder carry a mandatory life sentence. the only discretion that the judge has in sentencing is life with with parole or without parole. even if the judge grants the possibility of parole. they have to serve 30 years in prison before they become eligible. that s quite a long time. when do you think we re going to i don t think they have announced the sentencing hearing yet, but how quickly do those normally happen post guilty verdict? it depends on the jurisdiction. there s not going to be a whole lot of suspense about the sentence. here i think that the next focus will be on the federal charges. and whether frankly they will cop a plea. since most will spend the rest of their lives in prison, they
and the goal of that line of questioning was to tease out the extent of the implications of that. it s one thing to say we need more rehabilitation and we need to reform the way we do sentencing laws. if notion that there is no category of people who are currently in prison deserves to be behind bars is a pretty provacative argument to say the least. you got human traffickers and massive child sex traffickers, terrorists and etc. that was the lineup of e requesting. she seems to walk away from it. from that position everyone though
in my three days at angola, most of the men i spoke with had committed violent crimes and received long sentences. life without parole? yeah. but like every prison, there are also nonviolent offenders serving long sentences that might as well be life. john is one of them. i grew up in a middle class neighborhood. went to catholic schools. he is a gulf war vet who says he was lost and broken when he came home. well, i had no direction in life. in 2000, he was found guilty of running a massive drug ring between texas and louisiana. it was his second drug conviction. my sentence was 150 years. that s right, 150 years. he served 20 so far. his case is a prime example of harsh sentencing laws or both drug dealers and especially users. the legacy of the government s
vote for tough sentencing laws. located? jerry nadler, new york city. eric swalwell, san francisco. cori bush, st. louis. sheila jackson lee, houston. this happened to be the major distribution hubs for fentanyl and they are against those tough sentences. have i mentioned how much i dislike lawyers? [laughter] i like you, geraldo, i ll make an exception. the democratic party now doesn t want to reduce crime, they want to reduce prison population. they believe the fact that people are incarcerated, a lot of african-americans there, is because we have a white supremacist system, and they are the victims of white supremacy, so even if they have to reduce sentences, if that comes with an uptick in crime, they don t care. katie: so, greg, you have the opposite take. you believe in legalization, and fomenting more sentencing only exacerbates the problem? greg: first of all, in
you know, sure he expressed remorse. he was sorry. everybody is sorry when they get caught. i mean, i would have given him the maximum, personally. it would have been 21 months. it wouldn t have been a year and a half. i think that was too light under the circumstances. yeah. and elliot, hundreds of other cases are making their way through the courts. do these developments tell us anything about how these other cases are going to be handled? or is this going to be sort of a grab bag of different sentences that will be handed down? the sentencing laws strive to get uniformity against them. so you want them to track each other. that s how you know people are gegt sentences in line. this is an individual whose contact is relatively benign in terms of what other people were charged with, right? like i said, other people tied to extremist groups, other people who engaged in acts of violence. we can hope this is just the floor. but let s be clear. this is what the chief was saying.