"Affluenza" sentence vs. sentence for 14 y.o. black teen for participating in a robbery

[Igel]

44. Jackson was sentenced in 1999.

He's probably been resentenced by now, since the SCOTUS found life sentences for underage offenders to be unconstitutional.

Miller's is a bit different, a bit more hands-on. He and a friend stole baseball cards and some money from a 52-year-old man, beat him with a baseball bat, set his home on fire and left him to die. He's probably also been resentenced. His trial was in 2006.

A lot of sentencing discretion had been taken from judges by 1999. It wasn't uncommon for judges to actually dissent from the sentences they imposed. Don't know about these two cases. Juvy judges have a lot more leeway, both for mercy when appropriate and for miserable judgment.


The amount of outrage over the vehicular manslaughter case, though, also merits attention. It's been treated as a clear outlier by, well, pretty much everybody. It's not "business as usual." Any more than the Jackson and Miller verdicts are business as usual. Comparing extremes isn't a good statistical practice.

Glaeser, writing for NBER in 2000, put together a nice summary of how victim and offender characteristics affect sentencing (although he didn't look at juvy, just adults) in the previous decade or so. For adults, increased wealth meant a slightly higher average sentence although it's meaningless because the result wasn't significant (sure to strike many as counterintuitive).

Race, sex, and other factors were important, with women victims triggering the longest sentences and black (male) victims triggering shorter sentences. IIRC, black male offenders also got longer sentences, so there's a pretty bad skew for race for both victims and offenders. That skew to one extent or another shows up pretty much in all murder stats, but doesn't apply to the outlier Couch case.