Lori Falce: How does a Mountain Dew cost more than $1.3 million?

There is an impression that the law is supposed to be fair.

People who think that it actually works out that way don’t spend a lot of time comparing the way people are charged or sentenced.

When it comes time to pay the price for bad behavior, it seems like justice is less of a scale than it is a credit card. If you have a lot of money, it doesn’t really matter what your FICO score is. Your bank balance can act as collateral. End up in court without cash and it’s a different story — one where fees and fines and bail can dig you into a deeper pit than the criminal case itself.

But sometimes what lands you in court is that lack of money itself — and that is where things get really unfair.

It happened last month in Perry County, where Joseph Sobolewski was arrested over a bottle of Mountain Dew.

Was he arrested because he didn’t pay? No, everyone agrees that he gave the convenience store $2 and walked out. The problem was that while the sign said two bottles were on sale for $3, a single bottle had a full price of $2.29. With tax, Sobolewski still owed 43 cents.

Was he right? A clerk says she followed him out and tried to tell him he still owed more money, so perhaps he was in the wrong. But was he so far outside the law that police had to charge him with felony theft? That a judge had to set a $50,000 cash bond? That he could end up serving seven years in prison?

If we want to do the math here, that’s one year for every 6.14 cents owed on a bottle of soda the store admits he mostly paid for — and would have included a tip if the sale price was honored.

But what if this wasn’t the third strike of a homeless guy whose other two incidents are 10 years or more in the past and included one tank of gas and a pair of shoes, a total of less than $100? Would the charges or the punishment be comparable for someone with more money?

Unlikely. The higher up the economic ladder you climb, the game is almost entirely different — even at sentencing instead of just after arrest.

In June, former chief operating officer of Butler Health System Stephanie J. Roskovski, 51, was sentenced to 51 months — that’s four years and three months — for embezzling $1.3 million over the course of six years. Her husband, Scott Roskovski, 52, a former Butler County District Attorney’s office detective who focused on white color crime, received two and a half years in prison.

Earlier this month, Victoria Mazur, 54, of Plum was sentenced for embezzling $195,000 from Gateway Packaging Corp., a family-owned business in Murrysville that subsequently had to close because of her actions, putting 25 people out of work. Mazur was the company’s controller. She stole the money by processing fraudulent credit card refunds and hid the theft by making fake statements. Her punishment is two years in prison and three years’ probation.

If these crimes were measured by the same yardstick as Sobolewski’s soda, all three would be spending thousands of years in jail.

This isn’t to say that the Roskovskis or Mazur should serve more time. It isn’t to say that retail theft isn’t a crime.

It’s just that the justice system can’t be blind to the fact that seven years for a possible crime with a price tag of less than two quarters is obviously not in balance with four years for $1.3 million.