We do not often criticize the decisions of judges in criminal cases. For the most part, there is little cause to do so. That is because, in case after case, they exercise the power of their office to fairly apply the law and thus satisfy the demands of justice.

There are exceptions. Like all humans, judges are fallible. Only rarely, though, can a jurist be faulted for giving preferential treatment to an admitted felon. It is for that cause that we are compelled to condemn U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups' decision to assign no prison time to the first two defendants in a string of cases brought by the government against traffickers in ancient American Indian artifacts.

Waddoups, choosing to ignore federal sentencing guidelines and the reasonable recommendation of federal prosecutors, gave three years probation and a $2,000 fine to Blanding resident Jeanne Redd. She had pleaded guilty to seven felonies. Her daughter Jericca pleaded guilty to three, and got two years probation and a $300 fine.

Between them, the Redds forfeited 812 artifacts, including human remains, stone tools, ceramic bowls and sacred funerary objects plundered from federal land in the Four Corners region.

The U.S. attorney's office had asked the judge to send Jeanne Redd to prison for 18 months and to grant her daughter probation. The two were arrested earlier this summer along with 22 others following a federal undercover investigation, begun in 2006, of the lucratative trading in federally protected relics.

At Wednesday's hearing, Waddoups said he would "vary" Jeanne Redd's sentence because Blanding residents have long looted artifacts from ancient sites and thought nothing of it. Would the judge, we wonder, apply the same standard to a drug dealer from a community where drug use and drug trafficking are rampant and winked at?

Waddoups apparently gave no weight to the fact that Jeanne Redd and her husband, James Redd, a prominent Blanding physician, were apprehended for pothunting on state land in the 1990s. James Redd, arrested along with his wife in June, committed suicide the next day. That apparently did factor into the judge's slap on the wrist.

Waddoups further tried to justify his misplaced mercy, saying that "prosecution in this case provides sufficient deterrence" to the local culture. A white culture that flouts the law by uprooting and selling off the relics of another, older culture that its descendants to this day consider sacred.