ONE OF THE TOUGHEST tasks facing any judge is the fixing of a sentence that appropriately deals with the crime and the criminal.

And nowhere, we submit, is the task more difficult nor the opinions more diverse than when the task involves dealing with "white collar" crime and offences committed by juveniles.

Canadian courts have tended to be far more lenient than those in some other countries, and particularly those south of the Canada-U.S. border, where we observe the absurdity of multiple life sentences.

But that may be changing, in the wake of two highly publicized sentences, the first involving a teenaged girl who orchestrated the murder of a popular teen she wrongly perceived to be a rival for her boyfriend's affections.

There was pretty uniform applause when Superior Court Justice Ian Nordheimer rejected the idea of sentencing the girl the public then knew only as "M.T." as a young offender, thereby forever protecting her identity and removing any supervision (much less incarceration) after seven years.

Instead, he gave Melissa Todorovic, who was 14 when the boyfriend fatally stabbed Stefanie Rengel, a life sentence without eligibility for parole for seven years (dating from the time of arrest), the maximum provided by the Criminal Code for a young offender who is sentenced as an adult. Harsh as the penalty might seem to be, it's still well short of the mandatory 25 years of parole ineligibility for adults found guilty of firstdegree murder.

In the circumstances, the sentence was appropriate. However, the case did illustrate what we see as the most glaring flaw in the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA).

It strikes us as passing strange that recent moves to reduce judicial discretion by legislating mandatory minimum sentences for some types of crimes aren't accompanied by moves to relax some mandatory court rules that are clearly not in the public interest.

Nowhere is that more obvious than in the way both the YJCA and the predecessor Young Offenders Act approached the issue of identification. Under both Acts, the media is forever banned from identifying the offender, no matter how heinous the crime nor how frequent the offences.

Surely there would be little or no harm and much potential benefit from an amendment that would allow judges to permit identification, following a conviction, in instances where the disclosure is sought by the Crown, defence or the media. And we think that for those convicted of violent crimes committed when they are 16 or 17, disclosure of the offender's identity should be almost mandatory.

As for the "white collar" criminal, none has won more public sympathy than Livent founder Garth Drabinsky, who last week was given a much longer sentence (seven years) than some had expected, albeit far less than he would have received had the trial taken place in the U.S. (And one there may yet be faced, for the same offence of "bookcooking.")

We suspect there will never be any consensus as to the appropriate sentence for an accounting fraud that propelled a theatre company onto the global stage while ultimately leading to its demise.

The trial judge, Superior Court Justice Mary Lou Benotto, said she had taken into account the contributions to society made by Mr. Drabinsky and his partner, Myron Gottlieb (who got six years) but no one was above the law and the sentence was a message to "those in business and the community ... that this will be the court's response to corporate fraud."

Interestingly, the sentences were almost what the Crown was seeking (eight to 10 years) and far beyond the defence lawyers' proposal of two years' house arrest. And they average out to the 6.5 years Conrad Black received for his convictions in the U.S. for fraud and obstructing justice.

Appropriately, the sentences were far short of that meted out to Bernard Lawrence "Bernie" Madoff, the former financier who admitted to defrauding thousands of investors of billions of dollars through the operation of a 'Ponzi' scheme that has been called the largest investor fraud ever committed by a single person.

Breaking the normal rule that a guilty plea will reduce your penalty, the New York court gave the 71-year-old fraud artist the maximum 150 years the law allowed.

Without a doubt, such sentences win public approval. But are they really required?

Clearly, there's little likelihood than any of Messrs. Madoff, Drabinsky and Gottlieb will even have an opportunity to reoffend, and shorter sentences would at least have minimized the number of taxpayer dollars needed to house them.

While there's obviously a need to deter other would-be fraud artists, the problem is that since none of them expects to get caught, the length of a "loser's" jail term will strike them as irrelevant.

Politically attractive as they might be, long sentences meted out as retribution for high-profile but non-violent crime will likely do little more than further pilfer the public purse.