Pleas deal is miscarriage.
My guess is that the perp might have gotten away with an insanity defense, so 25 years was probably the best the prosecutor could hope for. Back in the day, when insanity defenses seldom worked (i.e. before the 60’s), the perp would already have been executed, because the typical time from *arrest* to trial to exhaustion of appeals and execution, if found guilty, was about 3 years. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Yes, but it enables te DA to count the case as a ‘win’.