TRUTH & PUNISHMENT

At a sentencing hearing this week, prosecutors will attempt to send former WorldCom chief executive and convicted criminal Bernard Ebbers to prison for the rest of his life. Regardless of the length of that sentence, plantiffs in the civil suit against Ebbers have already done much to mete out justice, reaching a settlement late last month requiring nearly all of Ebbers' wealth and possessions to be liquidated to pay his former company and its investors and employees. Even Ebbers' multimillion-dollar home in Clinton, Miss., must be vacated by his family by Halloween and sold. Is there any better punishment for avarice and greed than to revoke the wealth and property that was prized more than life and liberty by the criminal? It's perhaps true, and frustrating to believe, that the proud and prayerful Bernie Ebbers will go to his grave believing that he is a good and honorable man, innocent of the crimes for which he was convicted. But in some ways, that's an even greater punishment. Unless he admits his guilt (to himself, at least), Ebbers will add ignorance to his sentence. Rather than resolve himself to the logic of his circumstance, he'll be tortured with the prospect that he, an innocent man, was unfairly robbed of all his possessions and wrongly imprisoned. Remember, too, that before his trial commenced, Ebbers also proclaimed his innocence from the pulpit of his Brookhaven, Miss., church. If there comes a punishment for that particular fraud, we may never know it.