“You do want to respect the family’s desire for vindication that it was a hate crime. It’s a lot trickier to say that you want to respect the family’s desire that the prison conditions be as harsh as possible,” said Robert Weisberg, co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center and a former consulting attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the California Appellate Project on death penalty cases. “That’s a very, very dangerous idea, I think, because relative degree of harshness of the conditions of prison [is] not normally a legitimate basis for a judge in deciding the nature of punishment.”