Our justice system is fraudulent.

Who am I?
Who am I?
I am Paul Coffin!
And so Gom'ry, you see it's true
That man bears no more guilt than you!
Who am I?
24601!

--from Les Miserables (paraphrased)

Paul Coffin has not been chased to justice over a stolen loaf of bread. No, he has been convicted of stealing more than $1.5 million from Canadian taxpayers. That's a lot of bread!

And Paul Coffin hasn't been reduced to a number. Far from it. No, his "punishment" is to be confined to his lavish estate north of Montreal, between the hours of 9:oo p.m. and 7:00 a.m nightly. Harsh, isn't it? Don't feel too bad for the poor man...that's only in effect on weeknights. Except for those nights when he must give court-ordered seminars on business ethics.

That's right, business ethics.

As if we needed any further proof of the complete insanity of our "justice" system.

Has it occurred to anyone at all that this is akin to Paul Bernardo being asked, as a condition of his sentence, to give little chats on healthy sexual fulfillment? Or to Jeffrey Dahmer being required to teach a cooking class?

I guess the difference between Coffin and those other specimens is that when Coffin realized he was caught, he pled guilty. Oh, how my heart weeps for the man.

There have been a few times in my life when I've had someone deliberately set out to hurt me. Having accomplished their goal, they tossed off a "sorry" at me as if that would rectify things. They look insulted when I tell them

"No, you're not."
"Huh?"
"Sorry. You're not sorry."
"Yes I am! I said so, didn't I?"
"Sure. But if you were really sorry, you would never have hurt me in the first place."
"..."

Paul Coffin has to pay back the money he defrauded from the Canadian taxpaying public....because he was caught. If he hadn't been caught, don't you think he'd still be living high off the hog without a shred of so-called "remorse"?

In other news, Tyco chief Dennis Kozlowski was jailed for a possible 25 years and fined $70-million. Kozlowski was found to have pilfered some $600-million from Tyco on lavish self-expenditures - including a $6,000 shower curtain in an $18-million apartment.

The jail time sounds good on the surface, although I'll bet he'll be serving it in a place not too much different from Paul Coffin's "prison". The fine is a piffle. When Kozslowski is a free man at age 83--old, but not dead--he could have hundreds of millions of dollars waiting for him.

Just goes to show the rich and the poor still have two entirely different justice systems.