While suicide is a very poor way of coping with federal racketeering charges, I have to say that I'm somewhat sympathetic to Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who left a suicide note explaining that she couldn't face spending 6-8 years in prison:

"However, I cannot live the next 6-8 years behind bars for what both you and I have come to regard as this 'modern day lynching,' only to come out of prison in my late 50s a broken, penniless and very much alone woman," she wrote.

Palfrey had been staying with her mother in Florida since a jury convicted her last month of running a prostitution ring that masqueraded as a high-end erotic fantasy service. Palfrey argued that for 13 years she had no idea that the call girls working for her were getting paid $250 an hour for sex.

Palfrey, who did not testify during her trial, had said she insisted that her employees -- socially polished, college-educated women -- engage in only legal, "quasi-sexual" fantasies. Her case drew national attention when, shortly after her indictment last year, Palfrey provided volumes of phone records to ABC News. ABC posted them on the Internet, resulting in public identification of some prominent clients.

Palfrey's notes to her family said that she couldn't bear to go to prison. She served an 18-month term in California in the early 1990s for running a prostitution service.

While we can debate the pros and cons of prostitution, it offends both common sense as well conventional jurisprudence to treat it as a major violent crime like armed robbery. But politicians need to get elected, so they keep passing more and more draconian laws, and the mischief-making RICO statute is a perfect example. Originally intended to go after the mob, the RICO laws have been used to go after poker games. Money laundering laws are another example. It defies common sense to suggest that ordinary drug users who buy drugs are "money launderers," any more than are customers of prostitutes. Yet as Eliot Spitzer and Rush Limbaugh learned, common sense has nothing to do with it.

At the rate things are going, pretty soon hiring the wrong guy to cut your lawn could land you in the federal slammer.