alt Hacker News> Judges do what their name implies - make judgment calls. I find it re-assuring that judges get different answers under different scenarios, because it means they are listening and making judgment calls.
I disagree - law should be the same for everyone. Yes sometimes crimes have mitigating curcumstances and those should be taken into account. However that seems like a separate question of what is and is not illegal.
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The thing is, Laws do not forsee in all cases, and language is not completely objective, so you cannot avoid judgement calls. One example is computer hacking, which in many jurisdictions is specified in very vague terms.
> law should be the same for everyone
Nah. Too often their "crimes" are actually basic freedoms that they just find it profitable to deny. So many laws are bought and paid for by corporations. There is no need to respect them or even recognize them as legitimate, let alone make them universal.
The law is rife with words and phrasing that make legality dependent upon those subjective mitigating factors.
Laws are written to be interpreted and applied by humans. They aren’t computer programs. They are full of ambiguity. Much of this is by design because there are too many possible edge cases to design a fully algorithmic unambiguous legal system.