Even If Justice Is Blind, It Knows the Smell of Money

The light sentence a federal judge handed to Paul Manafort infuriated people who saw giving him only 4 years after his execrable behavior as a travesty of justice. But the truth is that for wealthy defendants, no matter how they acquired their money, lenient sentences are the rule, not the exception.

Ken White, a former prosecutor who used to blog as Popehat, lays out the realities of our two-tiered justice system in The Atlantic, listing six factors — none of them having anything to do with the individual judge involved — that tilt the playing field to benefit the well-off. It starts with who gets investigated. As White writes,

After 9/11, the United States Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Offices that it controls shifted resources and focus from white-collar crime to drugs, guns, and immigration. … You can jail 20 drug traffickers for life with the resources it took to prosecute Manafort. America picks who goes to jail when it picks whom to investigate—which is one of the reasons so few people involved in the 2008 Wall Street debacle went to jail.

And it just snowballs from there.