Watching a trial where the defendant is accused of causing 6 deaths and about 70 serious injuries [in one act]. What determines whether the judge will sentence him to consecutive or concurrent terms in prison?
In: 3
Really the recommendation of the prosecution, what the state laws allow, and any precedence set forth by similar cases in the past. The last one probably being most important as you don’t want someone with similar sentencing to get an appeal and be released if they received 20 counts of 10 years ordered to serve consecutively and have already served 10 years and would be eligible for release of their sentence were changed to concurrent.
Some jurisdictions specify different guidelines or specific rules about such things, but in general the decision will be left to the judge and/or the jury imposing the sentence.
Normally sentences run concurrently if they’re for the same action and consecutively if they’re for different actions.
For example, suppose that you shoot somebody and are found guilty of “assault with a deadly weapon”. They eventually die of their injury, at which point you’re also found guilty of “murder”. The authorities don’t remove the assault conviction from your record or void the sentence for it (for one thing, there’s always the possibility that you’ll successfully appeal the murder conviction and get it overturned), but the sentences run concurrently because it was really just one crime.
On the other hand, if you murder one person and then assault a different person, the sentences for the murder and the assault should run consecutively: what you did is worse than if you’d murdered the first person but *not* assaulted the second person, and you deserve a longer total prison sentence.
In the US, it depends on several things.
For one, if the two crimes were done in the same criminal incident.
Meaning if you kidnapped somebody then beat the crap out of them, then the kidnapping would run concurrent with the assault. But if you beat the crap out of a person then two days later kidnapped them, then the sentences will run stacked or consecutive. This is because it was two criminal incidents instead of one.
Sex crimes (in Texas) are the only crimes that can be made to run consecutive by the judge even if it was the same criminal incident or act.
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