Should Merit be considered in Court?

When watching the documentary on Harvey Milk (which was awesome by the way), what stuck out to me the most was the guilty conviction of 2 accounts of aggrivated murder, and only a (I believe it was) 4 year inprisonment with opportunity for parole. My first thought was that this was probably because he is a generic of sorts, and social systems love to see this type succeed. But i think this is a half truth, a little too hasty. He was a congressman, an ex firefighter, he was an active participant and contributor to San Francisco at the time before the murder. While I agree with the class in that his sentence was a joke, and should have probably been either life or death, my question really is this: should a persons prior contributions to society and good marks be factored into the outcome of a court case? I believe that these merits are really only considered if you do fall into the norm, however, if we were to apply these merits to every court case, even a gay black man fighting a DUI, would this be a better or worse case scenario than strictly reading the incident itself, and judging based off of this one abstraction of a life?

Why so angry?

I think I chose to audit this class because I understand why so angry, and i believe there is a lot to learn from the anger. I understand that your ability to be an individual suffers, and that a lot of you must choose between being true to yourself, and the life and people you have come to love. I understand that showing yourself for who you are is a risk. You risk a lot. I understand. I dont understand who this anger should be directed toward. If you direct your anger toward purely your social opposite, you make the same mistake they make, and you judge purely based on a single pre-requisite that in no way defines everything about you. This could also lead to an increase of focus on you as a bad person; an angry person. If you judge based on only those who hurt you, it takes someone close to you to hurt you, and you are now judging someone that you once found qualified to be close to you solely based on one aspect of their lives that the two of you differ. But if you choose not to direct your gaze toward either group, I fear it is directed toward yourself. None of these three seem to be the right way to go, but it seems right to feel anger, and anger more than any other emotion knows how to manifest itself. The problem is that there is all of this anger and powerful emotion, with no way to express itself without hurting the one who bears it.

My problem is that i see this, and i still have no idea.