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Sentencing the Person or the Crime?
Do personal resources aggravate or mitigate?
Every criminal court judge has to wrestle with the unpleasant reality that all is not equal outside your courtroom and you cannot make it so with any tools you have inside your courtroom.
That leads to some issues common to all of us, and I’m not confident enough in my ability to grapple with those issues to mourn my retirement and wish I was back in a criminal court where the rubber meets the road.
I rubbed elbows with enough judges from other jurisdictions at the National Judicial College to have some basis for saying every judge at some point gets in the situation New Jersey Superior Court Judge James Troiano navigated so poorly: a young person arrives in front of your bench who has had every chance to do better and, apparently, pissed it away.
The charge was rape and Judge Troiano had a problem with that. I am the same age as Judge Troiano and so he must have the same memories I have about the wave of reform in rape laws. He seemed to apprehend “rape” as the culmination of stranger danger, committed by animalistic men who leap out of dark alleys and confront their victims with guns and knives. The case in front of him was not rape because the defendant was known to the victim, had standing in the community, and did not accomplish his purpose by causing or…
