[tinokid]

This is absolutely correct and should not have been downvoted.

It is the abuse of a position of trust that aggravates this crime relative to that of a simple outlaw street dealer.

Commenters who are concerned with the effect on the convict's reputation and future employability are simply not in touch with reality....this was a grave breach of the basic ethics of the medical profession and seriously harmed the innocent patients involved. There is no return to work after something like this...any more than with a scientist who falsifies data, a teacher who sleeps with minor students, a lawyer who steals from escrow, etc.

I find it highly disturbing that there is more discussion in this thread as to the effect on the doctor's return on investment from his medical degree rather than on the individuals who bodies were damaged by someone they were supposed to be able to trust.

[csallen]

Nobody is "concerned" about the convict's reputation and future employability. You are misreading people's statements and thus misunderstanding their points. Namely, that the justice system serves a greater purpose than simply making you and me feel better and causing harm to perpetrators.

What point is there in discussing the so-obvious-it-goes-without-saying good-bad polarity of this situation? If we myopically give in to our emotions, rather than dispassionately examine the best course of action, then we'll miss an opportunity to improve the system and deter future incidents.

Stated another way, by attempting to redirect the course of this conversation, you are saying that virtue signaling by pitying current victims and demonizing the perp is more important than preventing future victims. If anything is highly disturbing, it's that.

[tinokid]

You're missing the point because you don't understand the gravity of the crime.

A minimum wage fast food worker is constantly observed by a phalanx of cameras that will incriminate her should she attempt to steal five dollars from the till, but a surgeon in an operating room performs an infinitely more consequential task with nary a recording device in sight. Why? The immense trust and responsibility invested by society in medical doctors.

There is a common misconception that a medical license is basically just a reward for a demonstration of technical mastery, much as a developer job flows from passing a coding interview. But in reality the technical aspect is only secondary; the primary purpose of all those years of training is to ensure that the student understands the fullness of the obligations associated with the profession and is properly disposed to accept them.

In a case like this, the person understood and accepted those grave obligations, as well as all the privileges that came with them, only to toss them out the window when the opportunity arose to make a few extra dollars. That is what is being punished here. Four years is hardly too long, or cruelly retributive.

[csallen]

I'm just not sure what you're responding to. Is anyone here saying or even implying that four years is cruel? Is anyone feeling sorry for the doctor?

[tinokid]

Well you yourself said it reflected the same kind of "emotional thinking" that led to millennia of "torture and abuse". What I am trying to show is that there are plenty of good reasons for this kind of punishment (whether or not one accepts a retributive component to justice). It is not simply a knee jerk insensitive reaction.

[csallen]

I never complained about the punishment, nor did I equate the punishment itself to emotional thinking. What I called emotional and dangerous was the unsupported claim that the punishment wasn't enough to be an effective deterrent and should therefore be increased.

[tinokid]

And that is the claim I was contesting. You seem to have an odd intuition that a line of argument that does not reduce to a computing problem is "emotional". Even if one does not believe in retributive justice at all, an adequate deterrent is still going to be in proportion to the seriousness of the crime. It's not something that admits of a resolution by facts and figures alone.