It is challenge to the powers of empathy to squeeze out a tear over the fate of Baron Black of Crossharbour. Still, from an Irish judicial perspective, you might wonder whether the prospect of several decades in the clink for ripping off institutional investors and fellow plutocrats is a bit harsh. You would be hard pressed to get a 20 year sentence in Ireland for cold-blooded murder, a crime most of us view as marginal more heinous than federal mail fraud.

A cynic might also speculate that heavy sentences for rogue CEOs serves as a safety valve during a period when income inequality in the United States is at near-Gilded Age* levels. They help persuade the worker-drones in the middle classes to buy into a nobody’s-above-the-law/everybody’s-got-a-fair-crack-of-the-whip vision of US society that no longer exists, if ever it did.

And yet…it’s undeniable that corporate theft is punished in a way it simple isn’t in Europe. And perhaps one or two present and former Irish heads of public companies, who sometimes appeared to treat their shareholders’ property as if were their own, tugged uneasily at their Charvet collars when they heard of Black’s conviction. Then they might also have thanked their lucky stars they never had to deal with headhunters along the lines of Patrick Fitzgerald or Eliot Spitzer.

*From Sunday’s New York Times:

Only twice before over the last century has 5 percent of the national income gone to families in the upper one-one-hundredth of a percent of the income distribution – currently, the almost 15,000 families with incomes of $9.5 million or more a year, according to an analysis of tax returns by the economists Emmanuel Saez at the University of California, Berkeley and Thomas Piketty at the Paris School of Economics.

Such concentration at the very top occurred in 1915 and 1916, as the Gilded Age was ending, and again briefly in the late 1920s, before the stock market crash. Now it is back.