NOT a single rapist, child pornographer or killer driver received a maximum sentence in South Australia last financial year
If you were to look at this as glass "hall full" rather than "half empty" then perhaps we should give thanks for this. If we assume that the court system works (not that it is perfect but that it works) then we recognise that a "maximum" sentence should not be the "usual" sentence.
The court system does not simply rubber stamp verdicts, but rather expects to take circumstances into account.
I am always deeply cautious when there is an outcry against particular sentencing, few of us are in the court to hear the circumstances. Newspapers and television necessarily abbreviate the reporting and habitually miss the complex detail out. Circumstances are often and inevitably complex and often "boring" detail.
So outcry is often based on an incomplete reading of the evidence...hardly justice. The trouble is (and the cause of outcry) that we disagree about how circumstances should be weighted.
Isn't that why we have judges and magistrates? And why in the free world we do not allow (by and large) politicians to imprison people.
