A recent article regarding a second-degree murder charge reduced to a guilty plea to involuntary manslaughter had a few errors in it. While the Washington Daily News usually does not address corrections in editorials, these corrections do tie in with a larger issue — that of North Carolina sentencing: who gets what time for what crime.

In Beaufort County Superior Court on July 15, a Chocowinity man was sentenced for his role in the death of his friend, who also happened to be his ex-brother-in-law. Before the judge handed down the sentence, two members of the victim’s family addressed the court. The first was Diane Clark (sister-in-law of the victim, Billy Clark, and not the sister as printed), who said this: “The sentence does not fit the viciousness of the crime. But Donald, you have to live with killing another human being — the father of your sister’s child. I pray you realize the people you have hurt and do everything you can do to show remorse and ask for forgiveness.”

The victim’s brother was next to speak — it was erroneously printed in the Daily News that Curtis Clark told the judge that the defendant was innocent. Not so. What Curtis Clark said was “Justice is blind. The court proved this to be true by the sentence they gave Donald.”

Through conversation with the Clark family, it becomes apparent they have many questions involving the death of their loved one: why the case took five years to be resolved; why no one else present at the time of the incident was charged. But the question they have that rises above all others is why did a man judged responsible for another man’s death only get two years, two months in prison?

It’s a good question.

In Beaufort County, there are many drug cases that make their way through Superior Court. There are many young, (predominantly) black, (predominantly) men who are sent to prison for selling drugs. Multiple offenders get multiple years — many more than two years, two months.

Take a case from last year: the brutal murder of Bath resident Len Willson. The perpetrator of that crime will be rightly imprisoned for a minimum of 41 years before he’s eligible for parole. The man who witnessed the murder as he was robbing the house, and did nothing to stop it, received a 27-year sentence. Another man — Domonic Farrow —was in the car around the corner, never knew what the others were doing, had no role in the crime whatsoever — he’s still in prison. He’ll serve five years total for essentially being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

How does that work? That a man guilty only of hitching a ride with a relative, then not immediately contacting authorities when he learned about a crime, gets five years in prison, while another man beats a friend and lets him lay in his yard, suffering from the severe head trauma and hypothermia that would kill him — a crime called “especially heinous, atrocious or cruel” by the presiding judge — gets two years, two months in prison?

Perhaps Curtis Clark is right: some justice is blind, but not with objectivity. This blindness runs more along the lines of stumbling around in the dark.