I’m all in favor of people getting justice for their crimes and all that stuff. But there are some mistakes whose consequences are so severe that further legal punishment really doesn’t make any sense. For example, I think people should pay a fine if they try to feed cigars to bears at the zoo. But, if in the process the bear bites off half your face, the courts should pretty much stay out of it.

The story of Robert Jenkins seems to fall pretty squarely into that category. Desertion is bad and should be punished. Defection is even worse. But forty years of hell in North Korea seems to have been a pretty good punishment for his actions. He wasted his whole life, and regretted his decision every day. I was glad to see the army went relatively easy on the guy — dishonorable discharge, demotion, but only 25 days in the stockade — while still upholding the principle that what he did was unforgivable. He reportedly had to share as much intelligence as he could as well. If he’d spent the last forty years living it up in a Russian dacha, I would have been glad to see him spend the remainder of his days behind bars. But this seems like the right call to me.