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?
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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.
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