More absurd sentencing

A pueblo police officer already mad at being served a burger spiked with marijuana is even more upset that the two men responsible got probation instead of jail sentences. Henry Gabaldon and a fellow Isleta pueblo officer ate those burgers while on duty. Both got high and could have hurt themselves or someone else that night, he said. Gabaldon called the crime a personal attack that had no consequences for the attackers. "The message was it's OK to hurt an officer," Gabaldon said.

At first Gabald¢n was very matter of fact about what happened on that October night in 2006. He told KRQE News 13 how he and a fellow officer went to the Los Lunas Burger King and got Whoppers that had secretly been filled with pot. "There was a lot of marijuana on the hamburgers," he said. But it quickly became apparent how personal this is to Gabaldon. "In the end we have to go home, too," he said. "We have families, and that is what it was, to all police officers, just a slap in the face."

The two men who laced the burgers, Justin Armijo and Robert Nuckols, both pleaded guilty to the crime. Armijo was sentenced in November, and Nuckols was sentenced Monday. Both will serve no prison time only probation.

Gabaldon took issue with how District Judge John Pope handled the sentencings. "He looked at it like it was nothing," the officer said. In court Monday Pope said he knew the officers are not pleased. "I don't blame them for being mad at me," Pope said. He then told Nuckols, who admitted being high that night but saying he has since quit drugs, "I would rather you recognize that promise and make good on that promise as a way of making amends."

For Gabaldon, who said he or someone else could have died that night, that's not good enough. He said he constantly ponders the what-ifs of what might have happened. While Armijo and Nuckols admitted to the crime, each blamed the other for it.

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Legal crook gets off very lightly compared to corporate bosses

Tort baron Bill Lerach was sentenced to two years in prison yesterday, and he can consider himself a lucky man. His defense team had sought six months in the slammer and six months of home confinement for admitting that he had paid kickbacks to plaintiffs for helping him gin up securities class actions in the 1990s. The sentencing guidelines call for a slightly stiffer sentence, but 24 months is what the prosecution had requested as part of the forgiving plea deal he agreed to last year. He was also fined $250,000 on top of the $8 million in disgorgements and penalties in the plea -- though he stands to make as much as $50 million as part of the Enron class action settlement.

Mr. Lerach's lawyers also contended that he had accepted responsibility for his misdeeds. This is how he defined that "responsibility" in an op-ed piece published in the Washington Post last November after this newspaper declined the submission: "I'm on my way to prison because, in my zeal to stand up against this kind of corporate greed over the years, I stepped over the line."

Mr. Lerach built an entire lawsuit industry and grew very rich on the back of illegal payments. The resulting proliferation of strike suits has reduced the returns for investors large and small. Yet in Mr. Lerach's view, secret, illegal payments to professional plaintiffs in trumped-up shareholder class-actions are a foot-fault.

Mr. Lerach's op-ed mentioned the architects of the Enron fraud, but passed over the many decades worth of prison sentences handed out in that case and others, such as WorldCom. Instead, he offered up the following gem: "It turns out that the legal system is a lot tougher on shareholder lawyers than it appears to be on Wall Street executives." We doubt WorldCom's Bernie Ebbers, serving not two but 25 years, agrees.

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(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today)