Jim O'Gara was sentenced for two--count 'em, two--years in prison for his crimes. Allowing for time served, he'll be getting out later this month.
I'd say that that was a total travesty of justice, except he did get more than the federal sentencing guidelines indicated for the crimes he committed and the circumstances under which he committed them. The judge thought O'Gara was still a substantial danger to others (he had, after all, continued to dupe people out of "front money" even while under indictment for the frauds for which he finaly was convicted). But that's not enough.
Which leads me back to a thought I've expressed before: several things are wrong with our justice system. My first example is that people convicted of committing crimes while drunk tend to get lesser sentences because they were in a state of diminished mental responsibility due to being drunk at the time they committed those crimes. However, logic suggests that they rather should be held to a higher standard unless they can prove that someone put a gun to their heads and forced them to drink themselves drunk.
If someone voluntarily drinks to a state of drunkenness, and that someone is of legal age, that someone is aware of what drinking will do to one's "self." Therefore, one started on the path to one's crimes of one's own free will. Instead of reducing one's culpability, then, one's culpability should be increased.
By the same token, O'Gara got two years for a spree of frauds that netted him, according to the final newspaper story in the Sunday World-Herald, of over $ 3 million. Some of O'Gara's crimes had been committed so long before that they could not be counted as "points against" him under the sentencing guidelines. I would argue that they should in fact count more, because they indicate just how entrenched and on-going O'Gara's criminal behavior is.
What's worse is that someone else, who fraudulently obtained a credit card under another's name, and who charged about $ 1,500 worth of electronics and music on that card, got a sentence twice as long. That person's other crimes were included as "points against" because they were more recent in time and place.
And a woman who merely accompanied a drug dealer on a sale of meth got 10 years when she got busted at the scene. And the only reason she got off that lightly is that she cooperated with the authorities and gave them a ton of other information that allowed them to arrest several other criminals.
The system is broken. Not in its conception, but in its execution. Given how little our legislators want to spend on it, however, it doesn't seem that much will ever change. God help us all!
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