That’s interesting, and weird to me. Am not from the US, so trying to understand the situation. In my home country, how you come in a situation matters very much from a legal point of view. It can attenuate or aggravate your sentence, depending on what happened, no situation is taken completely separate from the circumstances which lead to it. And yes, it can even come down to if the person being judged is educated or not, their background and so on. But then again, there is no jury system, the judge (s) give the verdict so it tends to be all more technical and less based on feelings. I think that’s why I can’t make sense of this in my head, for me it makes more sense to look at the full situation when taking the decision.