justice.... the wrong way?

you probably all seen the hoo-hah regarding Craig Sweeney and his "lenient" sentencing but what does it all mean? why are they complaining?

At the heart of it, it is about how can someone that has done what he did get away with only having to serve a five odd year sentence. On the face of it, it looks like the courts have made an enormous blunder and indeed, it is the courts that have been geting the flack about it.
As the judge involved pointed out, the sentence is based on guidelines set out by parliament; he was only carrying out his duty and doing it by the book. So is he wrong? As a judge, his duty is to be fair, even in the light of a criminal who has admitted to a crime. To a degree, i understand the anger of the public as I do believe that people who commit a certain type of crime should be punished sufficiently but I am also in firm belief that all criminals should be dealt with in the same manner (in terms of procedure).
The judge should have a set of guidelines which are clear and make sense and be universally applicable. Sentencing shouldn't be arbitary or dependent on how much press the case gets. The judge should be free to what is just and he should be not doing what he thinks is right but what he has to do according to the rules. The judge should be free to decide if someone deserves a reduced sentence or not.

As far as i am aware, the judge in this case did just that so the only thing that is wrong then, is the guidelines and procedures that he has to follow.

The biggest flaw here is the automatic deduction of a third of the sentence that you receive on pleading guilty. On the face of it, this appears to make it easier for criminals to admit to their crimes but is this what we really want? Isn't it the job of the police and the courts and the process to PROVE them guilty anyway? Wouldn't it be better if it was a case that if you plead guilty you might get reduced sentence? Does this actually mean then, that the process is actually flawed? Ask the general public and I'm pretty sure that they would say that it is.

Then again, I have a hard time understanding why some sentences for certain crimes aren't a fixed thing anyway?
Wouldn't it simply be easier to say that crime x gets sentence x with no consessions or deductions for any reason?
Wouldn't that make it more of a deterrent for people to know for a fact that if you do something, you're going to get a fixed sentence if you get caught?
After all, for some crimes, no matter how sorry you are, it doesn't change what you have done and what you are capable of doing.

What also bugs me about this is, once again, how the government has stuck their nose in on the side of the public to chastise the court's decision when it is the governments guidelines that resulted in the sentence and its reductions. Instead of admitting to part of the guilt and admitting to there being a flaw in the system that they set out, they go to pin the blame on the obvious target? Is this what out government really is like?
What happened to being responsible for us?
How can we depend on a government that refuses to accept blame for anything?
I'm also not sure about the recent trend for the sacking of MPs who make mistakes. Wouldn't it be better for them to be kept on to try and fix what went wrong?
Put it this way, if I cocked something up at work, I would fight for the chance to fix what I did wrong. Instead, what happens here is that if you cock something up, you get fired and you don't have to deal with the consequences of what you did.
How is that "just"?

Getting sacked sounds like a harsh punishment but it actually means you don't have to face that mess that you created. Isn't it then just a way of making it easier on the MPs?
"oh, I don't have to worry if I mess up, I'll just get fired, get another job and someone else will have to deal with it"

great.