"Internet mob justice is random and severe. So is formal criminal justice."

"The problem with mob justice, Vox's Max Fisher wrote, is that it's random and severe. That's why the dentist who killed Cecil was punished by an internet mob, while other killers of rare wild animals were not. Mob justice "treats justice as a sort of random lightning bolt from the sky; one is reminded of the vengeful but arbitrary gods of Greek or Roman lore," he wrote...

Beau Kilmer, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, in July described how the criminal justice system works with a comparison to parenting: "You tell a kid to not take cookies from the cookie jar. You don't give them a slap on the wrist, a slap on the wrist, a slap on the wrist, and then give them a time-out for six weeks. But that's kind of what we do in our criminal justice system with respect to substance abuse — we say don't do this, don't do that, don't do that, and then all of a sudden after maybe the eighth failed test, we revoke their probation or parole and throw them in prison for years."

It would be one thing if these severe punishments deterred crime. But people don't tend to look at severe stories like Angelos's as a warning for using or selling drugs; they see them as outrageous aberrations. And there's a good reason for that: If you were born in 1991, the chances of you going to federal or state prison were roughly 5.2 percent, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Those are low odds for a population of which roughly 4 in 10 have told Gallup that they used marijuana, breaking the law, at some point in their lives."
http://www.vox.com/2015/7/31/9078777/criminal-justice-cecil-the-lion