Junk sentence for Milken.

So MICHAEL MILKEN is now going to jail. You might assume that his offenses must have been serious indeed, considering that the rapists and near-murderers of the Central Park jogger got sentences of five to ten years, while the judge handed Milken a flat ten-year sentence. Instead, the Milken case shows that equality under law does not apply in extreme cases, such as the crime of symbolizing a "greedy decade."

Milken's punishment was so unexpected that even members of the press, who had brayed against him for years, collectively gasped in the courtroom when the sentence was announced. One reason is that the more that people learned about the prosecution case, the weaker it looked. What started out as Rudy Giuliani's bully-boy 98-count indictment alleging insider trading and "racketeering" under RICO eventually came down to six pleas on crimes so petty that if Milken had been anyone else the punishment would have been a stern letter from securities regulators.

His crimes, which a jury never got to consider, were far from transgressions of the Ten Commandments. It is no doubt wrong to aid and abet the false securities filing of a client, but this is not a sin that normally earns a jail term. Ivan Boesky traded suitcases of cash for stolen insider information, yet got only three years because he cooperated with prosecutors. Federal Judge Kimba Wood agreed that Milken was no insider trader and that junk bonds were not some kind of Ponzi scheme. Instead, she said Milken deserved more punishment as a deterrent precisely because his technical and regulatory crimes were amorphous and any victims, therefore, remain hard to find. It's apparently better to mug someone in the street at high noon than to step just over the line of some hazy regulations. This logic mocks the idea that punishment must fit the crime.

Still, the fact that the Milken sentence trashed the rule of law to serve the bald political purpose of bashing an era of takeovers and junk bonds is only one of the problems with that sentence. The greater problem is that all the prosecutor's journalists and all the prosecutor's judges won't be able to put the booming economy of the 1980s back together again. Milken was the symbol of much that was good, including junk bonds that gave small entrepreneurs access they no longer have to capital. The would-be MCIs and Turner Broadcastings of the 1990s instead face stillbirth, strangled by the credit crunch created in large part by overzealous regulators.