Madoff Sentenced to 150 Years - NYTimes.com: "In pronouncing the sentence — the maximum he could have handed down — Judge Denny Chin turned aside Mr. Madoff’s own assertions of remorse and rejected the suggestion from Mr. Madoff’s lawyers that there was a sense of “mob vengeance” surrounding calls for a long prison term. Mr. Madoff’s crimes, the judge said, were “extraordinarily evil.”"
And with good reason. Clearly, Madoff was engaged in fraud on a colossal scale, which cost a great many people a great deal of money. Some of them could afford the hit; others could not, and there's no denying that lately, any financial hit is painful. I get that.
The problem is that the Madoff sentencing comes on the tail of things like this:
Furor Builds Over Child Rapist's Sentence
David Harold Earls, 64, of the southeastern Oklahoma town of McAlester, pleaded no contest last month to first-degree rape and forcible sodomy. Normally, the rape charge carries a sentence of between five years to life in prison, but the deal he struck with prosecutors called for 19 years of his 20-year sentence to be suspended.
(Effectively sentencing Earls to one year in prison)
And, more importantly, ideas like this:
Is Rape Serious?
Why don’t police departments treat rape kits with urgency? One reason is probably expense — each kit can cost up to $1,500 to test — but there also seems to be a broad distaste for rape cases as murky, ambiguous and difficult to prosecute, particularly when they involve (as they often do) alcohol or acquaintance rape.
The point being, of course, that fraud will keep a man off the streets, but violent criminals (if the victims are even able to bring them to court) will be back on the streets before the evidence can be fully processed.
Proving once again that, here in America, money is worth much more than humanity.
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