Life sentences do not always mean life in prison without parole. People with 1 life sentence can get out well before their death if they are paroled. By giving 2 consecutive life sentences, the person begins serving the 2nd one as soon as paroled for the first, thereby making it closer to an actual life sentence.
For skewed distributions, it is quite common to have one tail of the distribution considerably longer or drawn out relative to the other tail. A skewed right distribution is one in which the tail is on the right side. A skewed left distribution is one in which the tail is on the left side. The above histogram is for a distribution that is skewed right. Skewed distributions bring a certain philosophical complexity to the very process of estimating a typical value for the distribution.
For example, if the distribution is positively skewed, the mean would be pulled in the direction of the skewness, or be pulled toward larger numbers. One way to remember the order of the mean, median, and mode in a skewed distribution is to remember that the mean is pulled in the direction of the extreme scores. In a positively skewed distribution, the extreme scores are larger, thus the mean is larger than the median.