110 year sentence for fatal traffic accident

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This seems a little harsh? isn't the truck company responsible for the brakes being in order rather than the driver?

It wasn't his fault the breaks went out. But it was his fault for intentionally not driving onto several emergency truck exits he passed by that exist to stop runaway trucks.

Does his license check out?

I have no idea. But what difference would that make?

Rogel Aguilera-Mederos' recent sentencing sparked significant backlash. The Colorado man received 110 years behind bars after his truck brakes failed, causing a traffic accident that killed four people in April 2019. The first person to object to the sentence was the judge who imposed it, lamenting the state's mandatory sentencing laws as he handed it down. Another government official is now speaking up: First Judicial District Attorney Alexis King, who sought the punishment in the first place, and who tells Reason she never felt such a punitive response was necessary to protect public safety.

"My administration contemplated a significantly different outcome in this case and initiated plea negotiations but Mr. Aguilera-Mederos declined to consider anything other than a traffic ticket," she told me last week.

King's statement may not shock the conscience at first glance: Plea deals are a fixture of the U.S. criminal legal system. But her remarks hit at something deeper. By her own admission, Aguilera-Mederos was sentenced to die in prison not because the state felt that was the fair and just punishment, but because he insisted on exercising his constitutional right to trial.

Called the "trial penalty," prosecutors are known to pile on superfluous charges and threaten astronomical prison time unless the defendant agrees to plead guilty and save them the trouble of a trial. Should the defendant insist on his innocence, and should a jury disagree, he will likely receive a much more severe sentence for the same actions. The only difference is that he invoked his Sixth Amendment right.

[...]

"Prosecutors vastly prefer for cases, almost always, to resolve through plea bargains. They're faster, and they're much more certain for the government," says Clark Neily, senior vice president for legal studies at the Cato Institute. "Jury trials by contrast are expensive, time consuming, and uncertain….What [prosecutors] will do oftentimes is to get very creative in bringing all of the charges that they can think of, basically to increase the defendant's exposure."

That exposure then becomes a powerful bargaining chip against those facing time behind bars. Aguilera-Mederos took the gamble. He was charged with 42 counts and convicted on 27, resulting in the mandatory century-plus sentence.

Both the defense and the government acknowledged that Aguilera-Mederos' truck brakes gave out and that the accident wasn't driven by malice. So you can perhaps imagine why he thought a jury might sympathize. He was correct: After the sentencing, one person on the panel said he "cried [his] eyes out," unaware that convicting him on the charges the government brought would carry such a ghastly term. (Juries are not informed what punishments are attached to crimes.)

I was curious as the rational behind very long prison sentences in the USA - ones far exceeding the normal life span of a human being. I googled it and came up with this. Interesting how countries differ in their approach. The Norwegian guy who shot over 70 mainly young people was given 20 years in total.

https://theconversation.com/why-does-th ... son-120485