If a crime is marginally worse than something deserving a 20-year sentence, an additional 3 months, say, doesn’t seem enough: it doesn’t feel there’s enough of a difference between a stretch of 20 years and one of 20 years and 3 months. But of course there is: 3 months in prison is still 3 months in prison, regardless of what came before. And yet, instead of adding a few months on, judges will jump to the next noticeably different sentence length, which in this case is 25 years.
