Headscratchers / American History X

• Derek gets three years in prison for killing two guys, and Danny says that if he had testified against Derek in court he would have gotten life. How does that make any sense? The insinuation is that the sentence would have been increased because Danny's testimony would show that Derek killed a man he had already neutralized as a threat, and did so in an especially cruel and premeditated way, but how is that not already evident? They have a corpse on the scene that has clearly been curb stomped and was shot multiple times prior to death by Derek's gun, it's going to be pretty obvious that it was Derek's boot that slammed into the back of the victim's head, and even if Danny was the only witness, Derek was screaming at the victim right before the curb stomp, so it's extremely likely that someone heard him (there was plenty of gunfire right before to wake the neighborhood up as well) setting it up. Did his lawyer manage to convince everyone that the victim just fell onto the curb with his mouth open, and that only witness testimony could refute that? And if so, why doesn't he walk? Was the verdict in his case "we're 99% sure he murdered this guy and should get life, but there's no witnesses, so let's just arbitrarily split the difference and give him three years"? Or did the murder charge not stick at all and he ended up going down for his firearm not being registered or something similar? Did the lack of a witness mean Derek got a sweetheart deal despite significant and obvious evidence that he murdered someone? I just don't know how they get to three years unless the investigation was botched and they managed to get him for something else.
  • While I'm not a lawyer and not exactly an expert in California's legal code, my understanding is that what Derek did falls within the category of voluntary manslaughter—an intentional act of killing when there are extenuating circumstances making the act more understandable, in this case the fact that they were invading his property but didn't constitute enough of a threat for his act to be considered self-defense, and certainly where what he did would have been excessive even if it had been purely in defense. It's an ambiguous situation where there isn't necessarily a clear-cut answer, but I do think the movie heavily implied Derek got a soft sentence, and that racism played a role; if the races had been reversed, with a black man protecting his property against white gang members and exacting the same brutal murder against them, he'd have had the book thrown at him. Keep in mind that what stuck out about Derek's response was the sheer cruelty of it, which is something that can easily be overlooked if you weren't there and lack the testimony of a witness who saw it from up close, as Danny did (there may have been other witnesses, but they probably all saw it from a distance).