[bmelton]

If she were sentenced 1 day's prison time for each of the occurrences, it would add up to ~40,000 days in prison, or ~109 years.

I don't disagree that there's an institutional failure, and that perhaps there are others to blame, but she has negligently affected countless lives by disregarding her oaths to uphold the law, and I believe that sort of thing should carry more penalty, not less. Also, we really, really need to start making our civil servants accountable to flagrant violations of the law, lest we have more of them lying before Congress without fear of actual penalty.

[judk]

I suspect the more they pin on her (and the news articles so far have been very much "witchy"), the more they will deflect from the lax oversight in the lab and the collusion of the prosecutors.

[bmelton]

I don't disagree at all. Meanwhile, I'm convinced that the more they don't pin on her, the more it means that they're giving her lenience so that she doesn't roll over and spill details on those institutional failures that they might all have been a part of.

FYI, this post is egregiously oversimplifying, and I deserve ridicule for that, but I'm going to bed -- on a normal day, I wouldn't respond to this for some time.