They nearly beat the man to death.

In the Dodger Stadium parking lot, after a game against the San Francisco Giants, Marvin Norwood, 33, and Louie Sanchez, 31, knocked a man wearing a jersey of the opposing team to the ground. A witness heard his skull thud on the asphalt.

Bryan Stow lay on the ground helpless.

But his attackers kept up the assault. One repeatedly kicked the off-duty paramedic in the head. He was lucky to survive. After arriving at the hospital, he was put into a medically induced coma. He'd stay in professional care facilities for two years. He could've stayed longer, but his insurance money ran out.

Now he lives at his parents' house.

For the rest of his life, he will suffer from brain damage and require caregivers. He was beaten so severely that, forever more, he'll need to wear an adult diaper. "He has to be reminded why a plastic shunt juts from the base of his skull," the Los Angeles Times reports. Yet the men who nearly beat him to death, when sentenced Thursday, got just four and eight years in prison. This despite the fact that both "had previous felony convictions, including one case each of domestic violence."

The man who got the four-year sentence would've walked out of jail today, given time served for the 2011 attack as well as reductions due to prison overcrowding in California, but for the fact that the two attackers will now stand trial on federal weapons charges by a lucky fluke. (They weren't armed at the time of the attack. But a search of their homes yielded a stash of five guns hidden in an attic that allegedly belonged to one man but were being held by the other. Neither is allowed to possess firearms because they're both convicted felons.) If found guilty on the federal gun charge, each man could face up to 10 more years in a federal prison.

That isn't half of what they deserve.

At the same time, doesn't it seem crazy that beating a man into a coma until he has permanent brain damage, results in a shorter maximum sentence—so long as it stops short of attempted murder—than illegally possessing firearms in one's attic?

On the whole, the United States incarcerates too many people for too many years: Despite a four-year decline in our correctional population , the U.S. has the highest prison-population rate in the world , full stop. There are, in other words, numerous tyrannical countries that incarcerate a smaller percentage of their citizens. Since the mid-aughts, as the national crime rate has dropped, a push for sentencing reform has gained momentum. It's a cause that the Cato Institute has been advocating for at least 20 years, as evidenced by David Kopel's 1994 analysis.

The details of his case clarify why it seemed like the best policy to right-leaning libertarians even during the 1990s, when fear of crime was at its height. "The most effective reform would be to return prisons to their primary mission of incapacitating violent criminals," Kopel wrote. "Revision or repeal of mandatory minimum sentences for consensual offenses, tighter parole standards, and tougher laws aimed at repeat violent offenders can help the state and federal criminal justice systems get back to their basic duty: protecting innocent people from force and fraud."