Like comedy, sentencing is all about timing

This week’s installment of Adam Liptak’s “Sidebar” column in the New York Times spotlights differing sentencing outcomes for certain enemies.  Here are excerpts:

At the time, a year after the Sept. 11 attacks, it looked like John Walker Lindh had made a pretty good deal.

Mr. Lindh, a 21-year-old from Marin County, Calif., who had served as a Taliban soldier in Afghanistan, faced charges that could have sent him to prison for the rest of his life. In a plea deal, though, the government dropped its most serious accusations … [and he] was sentenced to 20 years….

Times change.  Passions cool.  Other cases offer telling contrasts.  And Mr. Lindh now has a powerful and understandable case of buyer’s remorse.  “He was a victim of a hysterical atmosphere post-9/11,” Frank R. Lindh said about his son….

[T]wo men accused of quite similar conduct [Yaser Hamdi and David Hicks] managed to make much better deals.  They had the good fortune, it turned out, to be held by the military rather than by civilian authorities, and they probably also benefited from the fact that the memory of the Sept. 11 attacks had receded a little by the time they sat down to negotiate….