The legal system is supposed to make punishments fit the crime, not heap arbitrarily much punishment on anyone who ever breaks any law ever.
If you only never made any mistakes filling out your taxes, your moonshine business may still be thriving. If you only weren't selling loose cigarettes, you may still be alive...
As someone who was once an illegal immigrant (though not in the U.S.), I say this completely unironically: I'm grateful to be alive.
I think it does fit the crime, and it's not arbitrary. You get charged with crimes you committed because you didn't want to be caught committing a crime. "I moved the body because I was being chased by the cops" isn't a good excuse.
>As someone who was once an illegal immigrant
This is perfectly analogous. People in countries illegally sometimes engage in identity theft, illegal labor, and a variety of other things so they can stay in the country. The fact that someone "had to" so they could remain illegally in a country isn't a mitigating circumstance. I'm not at all insinuating it should escalate until you get shot, but if you get caught, you're culpable for every law you broke. Why would you not be?
Like, this is the simplest thing in the world. If you don't want to leave your friend's body behind if he gets shot while robbing a bank, don't rob a bank. You're not supposed to be doing that anyway. It's a threshold that everyone can meet. If you take the body, well, now you've committed another crime. I actually think that law makes a lot of sense.
The problem here is that the punishment doesn't fit our collective understanding about the relative immorality of various crimes.
Years ago there was a movie review site called moviecritic.com (a demo site for early collaborative filtering technology). After you rated a movie from 1 to 10, it would show you your rating for several other movies and ask you if you're sure. Half the time you would think "wait a minute, no, I really didn't mean to rate this better than The Shawshank Redemption" and adjust the rating.
A guy robbed a bank. His friend who died understood the risk he was taking; his death is morally "on his own head", even if the "unlucky" robber may have a hand in it. The punishment for this needs to be put next to the punishments for "violent rape", "assault+battery", "willful murder" and adjusted accordingly. Otherwise the whole system feels unfair and arbitrary.
If you only never made any mistakes filling out your taxes, your moonshine business may still be thriving. If you only weren't selling loose cigarettes, you may still be alive...
As someone who was once an illegal immigrant (though not in the U.S.), I say this completely unironically: I'm grateful to be alive.