Re: 40,000-year sentences largely symbolic, says legal expert

On Wed, 31 Oct 2007 18:25:46 +0100, Archie Valparaiso
<archievalparaiso@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:59:00 +0000, Peter Duncanson
<mail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:48:15 +0100, Archie Valparaiso
<archievalparaiso@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:52:36 +0000, Vinny Burgoo <hlunnh@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7070827.stm>

Four men were found guilty of planning and carrying out the
attacks and given 30 years for each of the 191 people killed and
18 years for each of the 1,841 injured.

The BBC's Pascale Harter in Madrid says the terms were largely
symbolic as under Spanish law the maximum term that can be
served is 40 years.

That's a very large "largely", in English usage. 99.9%?

And a wonky maximum, even. It's actually 30 years.

Does Spanish law have the distinction between consecutive and
concurrent sentences that English, etc. law has?

I'm not sure, but I get the impression that it's all very much left to
the judges' discretion. Although the basic idea is that each crime
victim is entitled to his or her full whack of "justice" in
multiple-victim cases as if his or hers had been the only crime
committed -- hence the longer-than-many-lifetimes sentences in
multiple-victim cases like the Madrid bombings -- I don't think it's
applied very rigidly for lesser offences. For instance, I very much
doubt that if in one evening you twocced four cars you'd be sent away
for twice as long as someone who had only nicked two.

Is "twocced" a word, or an editing snafu?
--
John
.

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