$670,000 Fine for Illegal Downloading

No country can possibly survive with a “justice” system this lopsided.  I guess it goes hand in hand with CEOs paying a lower tax rate than janitors.

Joel Tenenbaum, a former Boston University student, was fined $670,000 for the heinous crime of downloading and sharing thirty songs.  Off with his head!  And the Corporate Arm of the Republican Party — formerly known as the Supreme Court — has refused to even review this case.  Who’s this Tenenbaum fellow think he is, anyway — a corporation?

It’s not what you ripped off, it’s WHO you ripped off.  Now if this college punk had stolen billions of dollars from shareholders and bank depositors, he’d be getting a promotion and a larger bonus next year.

Stealing about $45 worth of songs from the all-powerful Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), on the other hand, is a much more serious crime.

There are too many examples of America’s huge sentencing disparity.  Here are just a few:

Set a fatal booby trap along a popular hiking trail — which by a roll of the dice didn’t ensnare anybody — and you get charged with misdemeanor Reckless Endangerment.

This column by Leonard Pitts, Jr. has some incredible — as in “you can’t make this shit up” — reports of absurd crime sentences.  Thirty years to life for stealing a VCR.  A woman shoots a gun into the air in order to scare off her enraged husband who had been strangling her — twenty years.  (The husband wasn’t charged with a crime.)  Another woman finally shot and killed her husband after he had been beating and kicking her for three days straight — fifty years.  What happened to that “Stand Your Ground” meme that conservatives have been spewing out en masse?

In the case of Joel Tenenbaum’s $670,000 fine, it shouldn’t be surprising that the Supreme Court isn’t interested.  A lowly individual versus the RIAA — in mean, come on.  Not that the Supreme Court has a pro-corporate bias or anything like that.  Just because Clarence Thomas used to work for Monsanto, and Scalia’s son is a Wall Street lawyer fighting on behalf of bank CEOs…