Wednesday night on MSNBC, Chris Hayes featured a story that’s been rocketing around the Internet: A Missouri man was recently released from prison after serving 25 years for a rape he didn’t commit, and the court clerk who help exonerate him (breaking the laws of the court in doing so) was fired for it.

But if one examines the details the woman wasn’t really fired — she was forced to retire early with her full pension (reduced by a very small amount), which seems like a much more reasonable punishment.

Sharon Snyder, a 70-year-old grandmother and 34-year employee of the court system, helped exonerate the man, 49-year-old Robert Nelson, by giving his defense team a brief that had successfully been used to obtain a DNA-evidence test in another case in the court where she worked, suggesting they use it. The judge deemed this a clear violation of the laws of the court, and suspended her without pay on June 17. On June 27, her employment was ended.

This was obviously a traumatic experience for Snyder, who’d just done a very good if illegal deed; she explained, “At first I didn’t know if my pension was going to be intact, and all I could do was curl up in a fetal position and cry.” As the AP report explains, Snyder “had been planning to retire in March” of next year — and later found out “her pension would be just fine.” So this isn’t exactly an ordinary firing; instead, it appears to have been ten days without pay, and a forced retirement.

Hayes didn’t comment on this at all before interviewing Snyder and Nelson, but Snyder actually does touch on it, explaining that she felt the injustice in her punishment was that she was suspended without pay, while other employees accused of embezzlement, had been suspended with pay, and not that she was “fired” (a word she doesn’t use), but that she had to retire seven months earlier than planned.

Obviously Snyder did forgo some salary during the suspension, and will have to start receiving her pension, a lower amount than her salary, now rather than in nine months, but this isn’t what most Americans experience when they get fired — and it’s a far lesser punishment from the court than we’ve been led to believe.

Her pension will be slightly lower than it would have been without her dismissal, because Missouri state pensions (circuit-court judicial assistants such as Snyder are paid by the state, a Missouri pension official confirmed to NRO) are calculated as the product of an employee’s salary averaged over his three best-paid consecutive years, the years he’s served, and a constant factor determined by the state. Because of her premature retirement, then, Snyder’s pension will be 57.8 percent of her high-three-year pay rather than 58.7 percent of it (the seven months through March won’t be added to her 34 years of service), and possibly a very small amount more if her high three-year pay is lower than expected. (She will also then receive a 4 percent cost-of-living increase to her pension for the next twelve or thirteen years, after which point she’ll get increases tied to inflation.)

This may seem like a lot of minutiae, and the difference (1.7 percent of the dollar value of her pension in the first year) isn’t nothing, but the point is that the judge punished her, but not in the ruinous way you might assume from the coverage of the story. She said she thinks the punishment was “too severe,” but it doesn’t amount to what the breathless headlines proclaimed — a firing, to the vast majority of working Americans today, means losing all one’s income, and having to find a new job. For a public employee, it meant beginning to collect her lifetime pension nine months early.

Which means the moral of the story isn’t really what people made it out to be. Snyder, an officer of the court, had clearly violated the lex legis by offering advice to a defendant about what might succeed with the relevant judge — quite a serious breach of judicial ethics (when, in fact, it seems she could also have pointed the defendant and his sister to such resources, rather than literally handed them a successful redacted opinion). The judge could hardly let such a crime, however well-intentioned and however good and just its results, go unpunished. One could argue he still overdid it, but officers of the court can’t and shouldn’t break the law with impunity.

The problem here is that an innocent man suffered in prison for 25 years and the assistance that eventually exonerated him had to come to him illegally — not that a public employee saw her pension reduced by a tiny amount for breaking the law.