Editorial: Justice on Pollard and Rubashkin

people is not a matter for historical dispute. The record is clear: we

are blessed to live in a malchus shel chessed, a country steeped in

kindness, and not only toward Jews, but to all minorities. America is

the champion of the underdog and the underpriveleged everywhere,

sometimes even to a fault.

That said, there are isolated, very occasional episodes when that

benevolence seemingly falters and needs steadying.

Before going any further we should make clear that we don’t regard any

old episode of a Jewish person facing prosecution or punishment for

wrongdoing as an instance of faltering benevolence to the Jews.

There are those who would have you believe that the system is stacked

against us. The justice system, the welfare system — you name it. They

sense the rank odor of anti-Semitism everywhere they go.

We wholly disagree. On the contrary. Part of our great good fortune to

be Americans, to have won the great geographical lottery of birth, is

the evenhandedness we can usually expect to be dealt before the bar of

justice.

But, as we said, sometimes the system breaks down, much as it

occasionally does for other Americans. Our system of justice is a

human system and therefore not perfect. The Pollard case comes to

mind.

And it is becoming increasingly clear that the case of Sholom

Rubashkin is also such a case.

This editorial page is on the record as disapproving of the actions

for which Rubashkin was convicted. He is a corporate criminal who

broke the law in a variety of ways at his AgriProcessors plant in Iowa

and for that he deserves to be punished. But above all else, he

deserves to be punished fairly. And if that is not going to happen

then it would be better for him to get off scot-free. Under our system

of justice, killers sometimes get off on technicalities. Rubashkin

killed no one and yet prosecutors are attempting to sentence him on a

technicality.

Nothing that Sholom Rubashkin was accused of doing, nor anything that

he was convicted of doing, warrants slamming a cell door shut behind

him and throwing away the key. Yet the government’s attorneys are

toting up his points under federal sentencing guidelines that are no

longer nearly as rigid as they once were, and recommending that he be

sentenced to life behind bars.

Convicts in the Enron case, one of the worst corporate crimes in

American history, received literal and figurative slaps on the wrist

compared to the sentencing recommendation for Sholom Rubashkin. For

every Bernie Madoff, sent away forever, there are dozens, maybe tens

of dozens, of white collar criminals who are sentenced to prison in

the morning and seemingly are on work release, or in a halfway house,

by lunchtime.

There is not sufficient room on this page to review all the details of

the Jonathan Pollard case, but in our view he was railroaded and, to

our communal shame, we have not done enough to help him.

Like Pollard, Rubashkin broke the law and deserves to be punished. He

does not deserve to be railroaded and it seems very clear that that is

what is about to happen. As a community of American Jews we should

exercise our right to voice our opinion, and do our utmost to see that

Rubashkin does not suffer Pollard’s fate.