PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER Editorial: ….Here’s the kind part: Melvin will serve the entirety of her three-year sentence in what Pittsburgh City Paper called “SCI [State Correctional Institute] Wexford” – that is, her five-bedroom, 3,600-square-foot, half-million-dollar home in suburban Pittsburgh. She will be allowed to leave her personal prison to attend church and to work at a soup kitchen three times a week…
The judge explained that he believes prison is “for dangerous people.” But that belief is not in line with the practices of the commonwealth or the principle that serious crimes deserve serious punishment. White-collar criminals are routinely incarcerated even though they’re not likely to stab the next person they see on the street…
While Nauhaus sounded outraged enough when he sent Melvin to her room(s), his sentence ends up looking too much like professional courtesy. Even the scarlet-letter flourish of requiring a mass apology wrongly suggests that the victims of Melvin’s crimes are her indignant fellow judges, rather than the citizens she robbed of honest services… (more)
EDITOR: Nonsense. The deal was likely to get the state supreme court justice to resign rather than to go through the process of impeachment which might have implicated others in the judiciary system and legislators.
