We are not alone (which isn't a good thing)

Just when we thought Youngstown had cornered the market on soft-hearted (or soft-headed) judges, along comes a federal judge in the Sunshine State to let us know we are not alone.
The story that confirms this was first reported by the Orlando Sentinel, and a version appeared in The Vindicator Thursday. It concerned two NASA interns who turned a learning experience of a lifetime into a lesson in larceny. But they got to walk out of court on probation, based on the contradictory premise that they are brilliant students with bright futures and that they were duped by another intern who was really the bad guy in all this. How smart could they be if they allowed themselves to be a part of a plan to steal moon rocks from the NASA? How bright could their futures be if these high-achieving college students were unable to recognize that, fundamentally, it is wrong to steal from your employer, your nation, indeed, from history?
High achievers
Shae Saur and Tiffany Fowler were convicted of stealing moon rocks worth at least $5.1 million last summer. Saur, 20, an A-student, completed two years of college credits during her last two years of high school in Beaumont, Texas. A student at Lamar University, she was in the midst of her second NASA engineering internship. Fowler, 23, had just graduated with a degree in biology from Texas Lutheran University when she received the prestigious appointment for a NASA internship.
They were arrested in July 2002 after Thad Roberts, a fellow summer intern at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, persuaded them to join him in a theft that rocked NASA's research community.
The trio broke into a laboratory on July 13, 2002, and carried away a cabinet filled with research notes and a 600-pound safe containing about four ounces of moon rock fragments and pieces of meteorites. Also stolen were notebooks containing 33 years of research by a senior NASA scientist. They have not been recovered.
The FBI characterized Saur and Fowler as minor players who were lured to join the conspiracy by Roberts, 26.
Roberts and a co-conspirator who was involved in trying to sell the space artifacts will be sentenced later this year and face long prison terms. But U.S. District Judge Anne C. Conway ruled society would be better served by having the young women continue their studies and so placed them on probation, gave them six months of house arrest and ordered them to perform 150 hours of community service. This was not petty vandalism and it was not petty theft, given that the moon samples were valued at $5 million, and the students deserved some real punishment.
High-cost case
Investigating and prosecuting this case cost the government (that's all of us) hundreds of thousands of dollars. The crime itself cost an innocent NASA scientist a good part of his life's work. To have a judge dismiss it as little more than jaywalking is an insult to justice and to the taxpayers.
It also sends a bad message, that tough law enforcement somehow isn't appropriate when the perpetrators are bright, well-educated and somehow sympathetic characters. It's a subversive message that privileged young people have somehow suffered enough just by being caught stealing national treasurers and vandalizing scientific research and that they shouldn't have to pay the same price as, say, a high school drop-out from a broken home who stole a car or vandalized a school building.
These young women were not victims., and they did not deserve to be treated as such. They should be in jail along with a lot of people who did a lot less.