OK, I know. Martha Stewart was sent to prison a long time ago; actually, she only served five months. When she was on trial, we all seemed to be waiting with bated breath for the official word to come and the judge to say, "Be gone, devil woman, and serve your sentence!" The American public seemed to be licking its chops to see this aging woman driven to the penitentiary in chains and suited in ill-fitting prison garb. We delighted in watching the antics of "Saturday Night Live" in its continuously cruel portrayal of the American icon.

So what does that all mean anyway? Martha Stewart violated the law. The penalties that made her culpable in stock manipulation charges appear to have faded away, but the problems that sent her to the hoosegow involved lying to federal law enforcement officials.

Let's see. When you were young, you told your mother that you didn't throw the stone at the police car. When it was found out you had, shouldn't you have been sent to a maximum security prison to serve hard time with seasoned criminals and career murderers? Well, of course you should!

When Martha Stewart entered prison for her five-month stay, she began to serve a sentence that is almost twice as long as U.S. Rep. Bill Janklow, R-South Dakota, served for maliciously, arrogantly and callously murdering a motorcyclist by speeding through a stop sign and sending that innocent individual to his maker.

The sentences handed down today for heinous crimes seem to pale in comparison to the sentences given to people for stealing candy bars and loaves of bread. O.J. Simpson, in a classic case of the failures of the judicial system, utilized high-priced lawyers who manipulated the truth into something that in no way, shape, or form resembled anything near the credible. Couple that with a jury that never listened to the months of testimony anyway and made its decision seconds after the trial began. The birth of the second millennium ushered in a period in our history that has murderers serving no time and people with relatively minor crimes heading for long and hard time.

The judicial system seems to be on a fast track to utter confusion. People who have been videotaped committing crimes are released because their rights to privacy have been violated simply because they were not informed of the existence of the cameras. Others hire the best (best?) attorneys to confuse the juries, entertain the audience, and bend the American language into a mishmash of incredulity.

We have lost all consciousness of responsibility, and our heroes are those who commit the most heinous crimes where we can revel in the fact that they pay little or nothing for their vicious behaviors. We also condemn loudly those minor culprits who break the law but fail to do it at a level of the Janklows and Simpsons. We cheer the Kobe Bryants as they rape and pillage, but feel that an individual who steals a car should spend the rest of his days in the penitentiary.

It would be interesting to poll the country and see if anyone believes that Michael Jackson will receive anything more than a new record contract out of the court proceedings going on today. The trial has nothing to do with guilt or innocence but solely rests on how much confusion can be presented and cemented in the mind of the jury. Victims become the guilty and predators become the heroes.

So why care anyway? Why not just give up and let the legal system take a mighty plunge into oblivion? Why not bar the doors and live hermit-like in our fortresses? The answer probably is easy to fathom. Our country was not created to force us to live in a society where segments of the population ran helter-skelter doing whatever they wished, but it sure looks like we have modified the prime directive to give credence to every form of bad behavior along with the rewards for it. We have sunk to a level where massive crimes and their criminals continue to live the high life while a car thief languishes in the State Prison of Southern Michigan.

America is on a mission to save the world from every form of bondage, but as our train of righteousness rolls down the rail, we need to be aware that the last cars on the train are slipping off the track.

Craig Gunn is an academic specialist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He can be reached at gunn@egr.msu.edu.