Daniel Rubin: Pa. punishments often go beyond the crime

Did you know that peeking at someone's e-mail in Pennsylvania carries a stiffer maximum penalty than keeping a slave?

Or that state law looks more harshly at someone who stole $2,000 than someone who sold a child?

These are just some of the weirder quirks in the piecemeal approach to lawmaking documented by a Penn research group for the state legislature.

University of Pennsylvania law professor Paul Robinson had his students determine this fall whether criminal laws were written in an orderly way. What they found was a "hodgepodge," as State Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, put it. "It's more than inconsistent," the Republican said. "It's unfair."

Students found scores of serious crimes with lesser penalties than penalties for lesser crimes. And polling of Pennsylvania residents turned up an additional 100 or so laws whose sentencing ranges were out of whack with public sentiment.

Robinson blames "aggressive politics." The more legislators feel the need to show their constituents they're responsive to the latest outrage in the media, the more punitive are the laws they write.

"Usually some incident happens, it gets in the headlines, and legislators get worked up," he said. "They feel obliged to do something about it. The natural effect is to exaggerate the penalty."

Pennsylvania last gave its laws a good scrubbing in 1972, when it simplified, clarified, and organized its criminal code. Since then, the code has more than doubled in size, to 636 offenses and suboffenses. On top of that, legislators have added definitions of criminal offenses in 1,648 more sections of state law.

Researchers gauged the vastly different attitudes Pennsylvanians have about how much punishment should fit a crime by asking 131 residents from across the state to compare the seriousness of offenses.

Take slavery, for instance. Keeping an adult against his or her will, according to the law, is a first-degree misdemeanor, with a maximum penalty of five years. But Pennsylvanians found that crime as serious as a first-degree felony, which can bring a 20-year term.

In most examples, the law proved harsher than popular opinion. The law puts the maximum sentence for selling a bootlegged Beatles CD at five years. Pennsylvanians thought it was worth no more than 90 days.

Reading someone else's e-mail without permission carries a seven-year term. Again, Pennsylvanians thought 90 days was more like it.

Politicians court trouble come election time when they object to overly stiff sentences, said State Rep. Greg Vitali, a Delaware County Democrat.

Vitali, who is a lawyer, said "legislators by and large tend to vote for things based on how the issue can be reduced to a sound bite and used against them."

He summoned an example from a few elections back, when he had voted against an amendment to require a two-year sentence for former sex offenders who fail to register their address under Megan's Law. He wanted judges to have flexibility.

Vitali's opponent mailed campaign fliers showing the legislator next to the man who raped and murdered Megan Kanka in 1994. (Vitali won anyway.)

The problems with the law run deeper than disorganization. Unequal justice erodes people's confidence in the system.

Matt Majarian, one of Robinson's second-year students, says: "If people have little confidence in the system, they will be less willing to serve on juries, less willing to call police, they'll be more willing to engage in vigilantism. This results in real problems in law enforcement and criminality."

The students presented their findings before the state Senate and House Judiciary Committees in December. They've proposed that the legislature reorganize its criminal code, evaluate the relative severity of punishments, and ensure that laws are not written too broadly.

So the next time people delete worthless data from a colleague's computer, for instance, they're not facing up to seven years in prison.

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