Equality is crap~

For the most part in our society we use equality interchangeably with equity, and people tend to conflate both to equivalency. No two people are truly equivalent nor are any two crimes. In lay terms- were they equivalent you could replace one with the other and no one would notice. In practice the idea of equality under law is a bit fuzzy in this sense. The idea isn’t a “true” equivalency under law, that’s ridiculous. The idea is that two people; committing the same crime, would receive the same rights, be charged the same, etc. but even in that the sentencing takes in to account the circumstances leading to the crime as well as the circumstances of the crime. A fairly recent example of a bias in law being a young college rapist who was given a light sentence y a judge who said they had too much “potential” in life to “waste” in prison because of being guilty of a crime.

The “equality” in that sentence was not that any person who commits rape would be let off so lightly. It was in that any person deemed to have “high potential value” to society would have been. The same mechanism was at work in post WW2 war crimes trials- with scientists who had valuable knowledge being pardoned death or prison for cooperation while those without such valuable information were hung or imprisoned. It occurs regularly when prosecutions make “deals” for amnesty or immunity protections- people with valuable information that can stop more crime are often given reduced or no criminal sentence for their ill deeds.