SOMEWHERE in Texas, Carl Richie is sitting in his prison cell and shaking his head while reading about British au pair Louise Woodward being sentenced to less than a year in jail for killing a baby. Louise and Carl
are an auwe pairLife sucks bad enough when you are in prison, but the Woodward deal must have floored Richie like a roundhouse punch.
Richie, you remember, is the unluckiest guy every to tangle with the Hawaii legal system. He's serving a 10-year prison sentence, but not for drug trafficking, murder, robbery, rape or -- the most relevant here -- shaking a baby to death.
No, Ritchie is serving 10 years for providing women to dance on men's laps at parties. Under our screwy legal system, you can shake a baby but you can't shake your booty.
Wait. There must be more to it than that. There is. Richie had the misfortune of running his business on Kauai, which, frankly, isn't the international hub of the lap-dancing industry. Running a lap-dancing operation on Kauai is like a 12-year-old boy selling his sister's panties to friends out of his mother's kitchen.
The Richie and Woodward cases are similar in that they both did something illegal and they both received outrageous sentences, although outrageous on different ends of the scale.
Woodward's slap on the wrist for smashing in a head should lead to a more realistic sentence for Richie.
I know there is a lot of silly thinking out there, but I don't believe we have degenerated to the point where the regulation of lap dancing is more important to us than the life of a child. But that is the message sent when our legal system belches out a couple of howlers like the Richie and Woodward decisions.
Gov. Ben Cayetano already has said he won't overturn Richie's conviction because lap dancing technically violates prostitution laws. But that's not the point.
THE point is that prostitution laws are violated every night, right across from the Waikiki police station. None of those prostitutes or their pimps have been sent to prison for 10 years. And just down the road are lap-dancing clubs, where adults engage in the exact same activity that Richie was convicted of promoting. None of those folks go to jail for 10 years.
In fact, in Hawaii, we have seen a gang member who beat someone to death with a baseball bat sentenced to only one year in jail. We've seen a woman convicted of killing both her boyfriend and husband going to jail for only four years. And we've seen child rapists get out after a few years and rape again.
But all that pales to Louise Woodward being sentenced to less time in prison than the age of the child she killed. And the judge didn't even make her admit some a role in the death!
At least when the federal courts figured out how nutty their sentencing record was, they changed the system. They created guidelines that set specific sentencing ranges for each crime. Federal judges hated the guidelines because they took away a lot of their discretion. But at least you don't have some British nanny getting off with time served, while a guy responsible for promoting an activity that many people don't even think is a crime going to the big house for up to 10 years.
I don't know what the law is, but if I were Richie's attorneys, I'd be sprinting back over to the governor's office or the courts and ask for at least a reconsideration of sentencing in view of the Woodward outcome.
Richie's in prison for three reasons: he didn't have an entire country rooting for his release, he didn't have a member of the Simpson dream team fighting for him and he was on Kauai instead of in Boston, where justice isn't just blind, it's lame as well.