In light of the helicopter case today, I am a bit confused about the sentencing guidelines used by our cousins in England. In Manchester, Samantha Brown, 20, and her sister Toni Brown, 24, were sentenced in a horrific murder of Brown’s boyfriend and received brief jail sentences.

Brown (right) and her boyfriend had been at her sister’s house drinking when the boyfriend reportedly caught Brown in a intimate moment with another woman. When he accused her of being a lesbian, she reportedly grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed him in the groin. When she fled the scene, Darvill allegedly begged Brown to call for a ambulance and she refused. She then stopped another woman from calling an ambulance. When the other woman called Darvill’s family, Brown again refused their pleas for her to give them the address for an ambulance or to call one herself.
After another hour, an ambulance was finally called but the man died from loss of blood.

Brown later said that she refused to call an ambulance for the dying man because she did not want the ambulance to wake her son who was sleeping upstairs.

Toni Brown was sentenced to just four years and Samantha Brown was jailed for just five years for the knife attack.

We have previously discussed criminal liability for people who fail to call police. In the United States, you cannot be charged for the failure to call police as a witness. However, Toni Brown crossed the line, even in the states, by actively barring others from calling an ambulance and her involvement in the crime which occurred on her premises. This is not a case involving the failure to meet the standards of a Good Samaritan but a failure to meet the standards of a human being.

This sentence seems shockingly out of proportion to the crime. These women warranted long jail sentences for crimes that should have shocked the conscience of the court.

Source: MSN