https://www.startribune.com/nicole-miu-sentencing-underway-in-apple-river-stabbing-case/600471841
Miu was faced with a thirteen on one fight, all by people younger and presumably stronger than him.
This is a clear case of self-defense.
The state couldn't get him on murder. So, they decided to offer the jury the option of the lesser charge of a reckless killing with a deadly weapon.
Miu is in his mid-50s. He's sentenced to twenty years. He was facing forty. So, effectively, this compromise verdict was, and still very possibly is, coming with a life sentence.
I understand that there's a decent reason why jurors aren't told what sentence would come with a guilty verdict. Juries are supposed to simply determine guilt or innocence. They're supposed to be the finders of fact.
Nonetheless, the prosecutors definitely know that juries are made up of average people who are easily manipulated. Seeing footage of young people being killed with a knife isn't easy, even though the teenagers were the bad guys in this altercation. The jury clearly saw that Miu wasn't guilty of murder. Anybody who is familiar with this case also knows that Miu wasn't just frantically stabbing without any idea of where the knife would hit. Nobody with half a brain thinks that Miu was guilty of the crime that he was convicted of.
I believe absolutely that the jury took the option of a compromise verdict, thinking that Miu might serve something like eighteen months -- like Alec Baldwin was facing.
If they knew that their compromise verdict would condemn Miu to die in prison, I think they would have decided differently.