Eric Hainstock, the student who shot Principal John Klang in school last September and motivated Frank Lasee to propose arming teachers, was sentenced to the mandatory minimum of life with a chance of parole in thirty years. The primary argumentative technique employed by the prosecution at sentencing was, um, pathos:
"I had gotten engaged four days before my dad passed away, and my new fiancé and I were planning to come down and tell my parents in person over the weekend. We waited all week. We were so excited, and I ended up telling my mom some of the happiest news of my life in the waiting room at the hospital while my dad was dying," said Kerri Klang, daughter of John Klang.
Hmm, relevant? She isn't suing for IIED is she?
"The only one I have not seen shed a tear is Eric himself. I have yet to see any sign of remorse," she said. "Less than two hours after he shot John, he told detectives he was hungry, so they gave him something to eat. He then sat there and ate a sandwich with my husband's blood literally still on his hands."
The JP will not condescend to some cheesy joke about mistaken ketchup identity.
"He's not heartless. People don't know him like we do. He's a loving boy. Everybody tries to paint a picture that he's evil and he's not," Shawn Hainstock [Eric's father] said.
Does the whambulance-like nature of sentencing bother anyone else? At some level, doesn't allowing the family sob fest in court make killing someone with a big family more culpable, sentence-wise, than killing someone whose lifestyle didn't motivate scores of people to testify at his/her behalf? Asking myself, naturally, WWWJDD, he'd tell me to read the statute, and I wouldn't find anything about first-degree murder of a cool guy being different than first-degree murder of a dbag. Someone needs to reel in the testimony allowed at sentencing...
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