The crime committed by former New York  Police Officer Michael Pena was, as Justice Richard Carruthers called it at sentence, “deplorable.”

Handing down a sentence that virtually assures 28-year-old Michael Pena will spend the rest of his life behind bars, state Supreme Court Justice Richard Carruthers said the former officer “showed by his deplorable conduct that he was not one of New York’s Finest,” invoking the department’s nickname.

“He showed instead that he is a sexual predator,” Justice Carruthers said.

No question about that. Pena was a forcible sexual predator in the real sense, not merely the politically correct hyperbole that reduces words to meaninglessness. His conduct was, in every sense, deplorable.

But that doesn’t provide much of a measure for sentence.  When the judge announced the sentence of 75 years, two things became abundantly clear: First, that the sentence was significantly more harsh than Pena would have received had he been convicted in a typical murder case. Second, that he would die in prison.  He was sentenced to death, the slow way.

In Tamer el-Ghobashy’s  Wall Street Journal story about the sentence, I sought to convey the disconnect between the deplorable crime and the severity of the sentence:

Scott Greenfield, a veteran criminal-defense attorney who runs a legal blog, said the sentence is “hugely excessive in the abstract,” especially when weighed against the 25-years-to-life sentence typically reserved for murder.

Mr. Greenfield suggested that Mr. Pena’s status as a police officer who broke the public trust and used a police-issued weapon was “probably an aggravating factor that elevated” the sentence.

Still, as legal thresholds evolve, Mr. Greenfield said, a life sentence for crimes such as drug dealing are becoming more common. He said it is difficult to assess how unusual Mr. Pena’s penalty is.

“Is this an extreme sentence for someone who didn’t commit the crime of murder? It used to be,” he said.

In the post-federal sentencing guidelines age, the post-Madoff sentence, it’s no longer possible to assess an unusual sentence. The range tends to be from harsh to ridiculously harsh.  Trying to make sense of sentences, or even to find context within which to place a sentence, is nearly impossible.

After Tamer’s article appeared, I received an email from a woman who claimed no connection to the case, but wished my wife and daughter would be brutally raped in punishment for my words. That someone overwrought with emotion would write such a thing isn’t uncommon, but reflects that an unfortunately typical lack of reason when it comes to the public’s perception of sentencing. The anger is so strong that they should all die, as should anyone who doesn’t share their anger.

Pena’s lawyer, Ephraim Savitt, was so outraged by the severity of the sentence that he took the media.  In an op-ed that was published in the Daily News, Savitt wrote:

True, my client was convicted of acts that are unpardonable. The jury found unanimously that he sexually assaulted the victim, but was deadlocked on whether or not he had raped her.

This calls for a strong sentence. According to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the national average sentence for rape offenders does not exceed 10 years. Michael Pena has been sentenced to more than seven times the average for his conviction on nonrape charges. Life behind bars, which is essentially what he received, is typically the sentence given to career criminals, Al Qaeda terrorists and professional hit men.

While making a strong case for the disproportionality of the sentence, Savitt took a problematic path to get there:

But what’s this really about? Will the victim “find peace” now that my client has been sentenced to the functional equivalent of life imprisonment?

Hardly. These days, politics, vengeance and trial by the media have become the order of the day. Those factors have created significantly higher watermarks in sentencing — but only for certain offenders, namely those who serve or served as cops.

His explanation for what went so terribly wrong is that Pena was a cop.  This argument doesn’t bear out particularly well for two reasons.  The fact that Pena was a cop, a New York City Police Officer, with a shield and a department issued gun which was used to perpetrate his crime, is a factor that should be taken into consideration.  Had he not been a cop, he wouldn’t have been authorized to carry that gun, a huge trust between society and a man that he can wield a  weapon and authority to serve society.  That he used it to sexually assault a woman is a massive violation of that trust, and deserves recognition as an aggravating factor.

The other aspect is that the newspapers, and these digital pages, are replete with stories of cops doing harm, committing crimes, even murdering people, who walk away with light to no sentences because they’re society’s heroes.  Maybe they did wrong, but we avert our eyes from the dead and destruction they cause because they are cops.  Savitt’s claim that cops have it worse because of “politics, vengeance and trial by media” just doesn’t bear out.