Well, in this case Ironimus' opinion is supported by the Israeli criminal law, which establishes an identical penalty on premeditated murder. However, even the Israeli law has been amended in recent years to allow for a possibility of diminished responsibility and less than life imprisonment.

Other countries have other systems. In the US, punishment is defined by degrees, between a maximum and a minimum, depending on parole board decisions; this allows for a more complex, but more constrained, system of plea bargaining.

The big question is, of course, whether a social "justification" of a murder should be among the mitigating circumstances; I suppose the bondary between what is "justified" and what accounts for a "clinical problem" are not very clear, particularly when law meets psychology.

Boundaries, not bondary... sorry, folks.