The Depravity Standard

Can evil be quantified or codified? On a scale of depravity, where would you put people like Hitler, Pol Pot or the gunman who killed scores of school children in Norway? ISIS? Boko Haram?

On a scale of 1 to 100, with 1 being the least depraved and 100 being the most extremely depraved, what number would you assign the following types of crimes:

• The perpetrator kills innocent people to spread terror to others;
• A person is targeted because that person is helpless;
• The perpetrator disregards known bad consequences to the victim;
• The victim is targeted because of the victim's race or ethnicity;
• The person's trust is painfully exploited for the pleasure of the wrongdoer;
• The intent is to cause the physical disfigurement of the victim?

We haven't really given you enough time to

think about each of those types of crimes for you to weigh the differences between them and assign a considered number. But if you're like most people of goodwill, they all strike you as awful.

Trying to think about which crime shows more depravity than another, however, gives us a taste of how prosecutors have to think when deciding what penalties to seek for the wrongdoers brought before...