Justice Says Money Talks, Killers Walk —Cagle

You're not alone, Vickie. There's Bernie Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme defrauded thousands of people out of billions of dollars (the final estimate was $18 billion). Now that's what I call wealth management. How long of a sentence did the 71-year-old Madoff receive? A whopping 150 years.

Yes, I've mixed apples and oranges here, but I could go on and on with examples of crimes against humanity that draw significantly less harsh penalties from the legal system than do crimes involving theft. The collective American conscience would have you believe that there is nothing that disgusts us more than crimes against the weak and infirm—those acts that rob people of a childhood, an innocence or a life. Yet we condone, via light sentences, these truly heinous crimes when we allow murderers, rapists and pedophiles to walk back among us within a few years.