As expected, Jeff Skilling had the book thrown at him on Monday and got an effective life sentence. With the smart money betting on the former Enron CEO getting a 20 to 30 year sentence, a jail term of 24 years 4 months was no surprise.

Peter Lattman at the WSJ Law Blog does a comparison with the other corporate crooks, pointing out this one is right up there with the sentence handed out to WorldCom's Bernie Ebbers and Timothy Rigas. The greater the investor loss, the harsher the penalty.

For an interesting discussion about the implications of the sentence, check out Professors Ellen Podgor and Peter Henning at their White Collar Crime Prof Blog.

They maintain, for different reasons, that we'll never see sentences like this again. Issues of deterrence and discrepancies with other sentences, like six-term Republican rep Bob Ney looking at less three years for betraying voters by accepting tens of thousands of dollars in illegal gifts from lobbyists (despite the criminal conviction, Ney will be able to collect his Congressional pension of about $30,000 a year when he turns 62 next decade).

The analysis has prompted Professor Larry Ribstein, in his Ideoblog, to note that the law is an ass.

Norm Pattis at the Crime & Federalism blog makes the interesting point that while the sentence sends a message of intolerance for corporate corruption, it also desensitises us for any big crime. "That seems like a net loss in terms of social utility."

In his Houston's Clear Thinkers blog, attorney Tom Kirkendall says Skilling is being sent to the slammer for causing Enron's bankruptcy and loss to investors, even though he wasn't actually prosecuted for that.

And why such a long sentence? It's the media's fault, he says here.

Yeah right. It was the filth from the media that was driving the company's shell games where billions of dollars in debt were hidden, pumped into partnerships collateralized with its own stock. It was the media scum responsible for the less than full disclosures to the market.

Is that right?