Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/11/remorseless-la-socialite-sentenced-to-15-years-for-mowing-down-two-boys-in-crosswalk.html
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Up for parole in 9 years. She’s getting off easy.
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I have a feeling that “consider my suffering” is not the strongest argument you could make to a judge who’s thinking about sending you down for gross vehicular manslaughter.
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The L.A. Times story really highlights the BS she’s presenting…
“Grossman refused to accept responsibility for the boys’ deaths and tried to manipulate the case from behind bars even after her conviction” (L.A. Times).
…and yet, all sentences were made concurrent… perhaps the judge’s logic was that the two boys were killed concurrently…?
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Here in Brazil this happens all the time, but under the mental illness card
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I’ll bet I know who this wealth narcissistic psycho supported in the last two Presidential elections.
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It does say she’s 60, so she’ll be about 70 when she’s up for parole. With any luck the families of the victims will have sued her for substantial damages during that time so if she is released she’ll be forced to live like the unwashed rabble and gasp! get a job to make ends meet.
For someone like Grossman that would be a fate worse than death.
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I think it’s mainly just the fact that a single act killed both boys. There are sentencing guidelines that include factors like whether the crimes were independent of each other and whether they were separate acts, whether they are occurred at different times, etc. in this case, most of those factors argue for concurrent sentences. While I think she got off easy, I don’t think concurrent sentences are unusual here.
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Not disagreeing, but it’s the idea that it isn’t unusual that is the problem IMO
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Not necessarily. Remember that most of the time when there’s a defendant facing multiple convictions, it’s a POC looking at multiple drug charges along with whatever else the prosecution can dream up to charge them with to extend the sentence. If we encouraged consecutive sentences instead of concurrent ones, the imbalance in our justice system would be even worse. I think it’s appropriate to tie to whether it was a single act resulting in multiple charges vs multiple acts resulting in multiple charges. What I think is inappropriate here is the 15 year sentence. It should be longer. Even if only one boy had been killed.
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That I could see, yes 
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I’m considering her, suffering. It feels okay man.
Prison is supposed to be this weird mix of punishment and rehabilitation. Cruel and unusual suffering shouldn’t be part of it, but somehow I think that the anguish she feels over the curtailment of her privileges … isn’t that.
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In theory, I guess. In practice, in the US, it’s almost entirely about retribution. There’s not a lot of rehabilitation that goes on.
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The bit that isn’t about retribution is about making money.
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For private, for profit prisons, sure, but not for public ones. They cost taxpayers billions.
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Kickbacks?
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Making money is the driving factor behind private, for profit prisons, but I don’t think it’s the driving factor behind public prisons and the criminalization of everything. I mean, I guess it’s about money in that keeping a certain segment of the population down at the bottom helps the people at the top maintain their hold on the top, but it’s not what keeps voters voting for “tough on crime” politicians over politicians who advocate for the elimination of bail and the decriminalization of drugs. What motivates those voters is retribution: they want to make “criminals” suffer for their crimes. They do not care about rehabilitation or other forms of restorative justice. And they also aren’t motivated by money.
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Since you’ve introduced the subject of voters into the discussion:
Those people want criminals locked away under the most austere circumstances imaginable, “not go on holiday at the taxpayer’s expense”, yada yada yada. You know the blurb.
How is this not a monetary consideration?
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Because the primary motivating factor isn’t their taxes, it’s the punishment of the criminals.
Look, the point I was making is that prisons, allegedly and theoretically, can serve three basic purposes: retributive punishment, rehabilitation, and protecting the public through both keeping dangerous people out of the public and through acting as a deterrent to crime. Our system almost exclusively focuses on the first of those. We make very little effort to rehabilitate anyone, most of the people in our prisons are not a danger to the general public, and there is very little evidence showing that a threat of punishment deters crime. Money is a secondary and tertiary consideration. Sure, on the large scale, there is a prison-industrial complex that is generating millions, maybe billions, for various corporations, but that’s not what keeps voters continuing to vote for candidates and policies that perpetuate this nonsense.
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