After his parents kicked him out at the age of sixteen and forced him to live in a shack, Brian Bassett committed a heinous crime: he murdered his mother, father, and brother.
May
2025
I wish to thank The University of Chicago Law Revieweditors and Professor Emily Buss for improving this Comment at every stage of the process. I also wish to thank the Sentencing Project for providing me with the data this Comment uses in its empirical analysis and my friends Vivek Magati and Joshua Courtney for assisting me with developing this Comment’s methodology.