Something to consider while waiting for President Obama to speak tonight.
Last week a federal court judge in Houston sentenced a former scouting director of the St. Louis Cardinals to 46 months in jail and ordered him to pay $279,038 in restitution for hacking into a computer owned by the hometown Houston Astros. The “hacking” was accomplished by the scouting director using the password of the general manager of the Astros which was the same one he had used as an employee of the Cardinals. (There’s probably a lesson there somewhere.)
Baseball is the “national game” and, as a general principle, computer hacking should be discouraged. Likewise, I’m sure that baseball teams think their player analysis is all very unique and valuable, despite the fact that anyone can see the players perform and scouts sitting next to each other at games have been known over the years to look over at the other persons’ notes, not to mention discussing players together over a few drinks. Putting all that aside, we’ll just assume that the ex-scouting director is a bad person who, hopefully, will be reformed from using passwords he has to get into other baseball teams’ player analysis files after almost 4 years in jail and handing over $280,000 to the Astros.
What stands out from the sentencing, however, is the contrast between that sentence for that crime and the sentences that are handed out by various judges in various parts of the country for rape. Statistics on sentencing are hard to come (a 1992 Department of Justice study found that sentences for rape averaged 9.8 years, which means that a bunch were less), and sentences are affect by the variations in state laws, judges’ attitudes, the ages and social standing of the rapist and whether the victim knew the rapist, among other things. As a result, we can all remember recent cases where rapists were sentence to considerably less than 4 years in jail plus maybe some community service or something of the sort. There is never a $280,000 reparation order, despite the actual costs incurred by so many rape victims over their lifetime as a result of the rape.
This is not to advocate for inflexible mandatory sentencing, which has proven to be a big mistake. Rather it is to point out that while there is much discussion of various say to “fix” the criminal justice system, one step forward would be for the chief judges of various state and federal trial courts to hold not infrequent meetings of the judges of the respective courts to discuss balancing sentences among various kinds of crimes. Published statistics with enough information for the public to compare apples and apples would also help.
It will be a great step forward for our society when young men from well-to-do families or those with a certain evel of athletic ability who rape our sisters and daughters are treated as having done something more wrong than someone who uses a known password to try to learn enough information to, in some way, help his team win a few baseball games.