It's important to remember that the call here is for considerations when determining a sentence, not guilt or innocence. No one is getting a pass on crime.
Overall, I think it's a good idea to consider a person's background when sentencing in order to arrive at the best balance of justice for the victim, punishment for the guilty, while also understanding that the former don't really lend themselves to a society free of crime on their own. I believe that social circumstances factor into a lot of the reasons that people commit crimes and if we can start to identify those factors we can tailor sentencing and rehabilitation programs to help people escape those circumstances, or build resilience and coping skills where they can't.
That said, it is unfortunate that the stronger admonitions in the law to make these kinds of considerations tend to come in the form of an explicit reminder to consider a person's race which does give the appearance of differential treatment for certain groups, even though the imbalance of people of certain races/backgrounds in the criminal justice system is well documented. The article in the opening post gives the impression that it should automatically be assumed that systemic racism played a role in the guilty coming before the court without explaining what the content of the "cultural assessment report" that is supposed to support the sentencing consideration would be or how the connection would be drawn in a specific case. It's got to be more than, "Black, lighter sentence," but you wouldn't know that from reading the article.
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