A homeless man is brutally beaten. Should the fact that he was an army veteran affect the sentence of his attacker?
I don’t see any reason why. I doubt if the person to beat him knew or cared whether or not he was a veteran. I would want to know why he was beaten before I made any further judgment. Where I live, some of the homeless types are particularly aggressive and scary, and I am sure that from time to time, one of them gets beaten up by someone who legitimately feels a need to defend himself. I’m sure it happens, too, that a homeless person gets beat up just because someone else just felt like beating someone up, and figured that a random homeless type was a legitimate target. In that case the attacker should certainly face severe punishment; but based on how some of the homeless types behave in my area, I would certainly not take it for granted that that was the case when one of them comes out on the losing side of a fight.
No, brutally beating someone is atrocity enough without them needing to be an army veteran. Whether they are a veteran or not, or whether they are homeless or not, or anything else, for that matter, does not change the fact that the person is human, and that makes the crime bad enough in any case.
