If you think the female sentencing discount is a myth

You haven’t been paying attention.

All of us have made mistakes, especially while growing up. It’s the nature of life; you don’t have any past experience to guide you by, and often other people’s wisdom doesn’t sink in until it’s too late. Some of us have had mistakes with alcohol and drinking when we shouldn’t have. Maybe some of us have even made the worse mistake of driving home hammered. However, I would suspect that most of us haven’t caused the death of another human being because we were drunk and driving when we shouldn’t have.

But that’s exactly what Ashley Sullivan did. She decided to get behind the wheel when she had one too many. Of course, at her age anything beyond communion wine is “one too many”. But we’ll ignore that for the time being. Any way, she got hammered and ended up killing her boyfriend. That’s vehicular homicide, and that isn’t a mistake. It’s a serious crime.

Or at least I thought it was a serious crime. Apparently not in Buffalo and not when you happen to be an underage female. The judge initially sentencing her to five years probation. But then she got the ire of the court. She decided to post a photo of herself on Facebook a month after the crash with the headline “Drunk in Florida”. That did it. The judge came down with the gavel and sentenced her to. .. .wait for it. . .six months in jail. That’s right. Six months. If it weren’t for my respect of human life and my age, I might be tempted to go to Buffalo, get hammered under the legal age, then kill somebody while I was driving under the influence just to see if I could pick up that sweetheart of a deal. My guess is, probably not.

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And it’s so nice of Sullivan to emphasize that she won’t be allowed to drink for the five-year probation. It is nice of her to tell us that she will be punished by being forced to wait a whole year after she is legally allowed to drink in the first place.

I’ve had reservations about anybody who claims that being in a prison is some sort of pampering that we all would die for. Prison is prison, even in a women’s or juvenile’s facility. My guess is that a majority of people would be in the corner of the cell sucking their thumbs if they even got a day of jail. That being said, any sentencing involving DUI and vehicular homicide should involve at least 12 months in jail. And no, that does not count home arrest.

It smells no better from this side

NY man accused of beheading claims he was battered

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) – A western New York man accused of beheading his wife at the Muslim-oriented television station they founded will claim he was a victim of years of abuse at home.

Muzzammil Hassan (moo-ZAHM’-mel HAH’-sahn) was in a Buffalo courtroom Friday, where he fired the lawyer who has been representing him for nearly a year and hired a new one with a different strategy.

New lawyer Frank Bogulski says he’ll pursue a battered-person defense.

Battered person’s defense, whatever the gender of the person who invokes it, should be viewed with a lot of skepticism. I almost view it akin to the insanity defense. There probably are some people for whom this qualifies, but the lawyer’s gonna have to pull a hell of a case for me to buy it. And just from a quick glance of the facts, you’re going to have to have Clarance Darrow to convince me that abuse was so great to necessitate beheading.

But in spite of the gruesome facts, I view this case with no more or less skepticism than I do with a woman who shoots her husband while he’s sleeping, or one who violate a restraining order and guns down her ex-husband and his new wife for simply going for the phone and then claims battered wife syndrome.