A New York judge sentenced a woman who pleaded guilty to fatally shoving an 87-year-old Broadway singing coach onto a Manhattan sidewalk to six months more in prison than the eight years that had been previously reached in a plea deal.
A New York judge sentenced a woman who pleaded guilty to fatally shoving an 87-year-old Broadway singing coach onto a Manhattan sidewalk to six months more in prison than the eight years that had been previously reached in a plea deal.
This is the problem of moral luck. We often want to punish people more because factors outside of the perpetrator’s control turned out badly. Either we should punish everybody harshly when they push an elderly person, whether or not it injures them, or someone like this should get a pretty light sentence. Yet we have an irrational pull to treat the cases differently.