Noel Arrigo's imprisonment will go down in our nation's folklore as a textbook example of Acton's Law: "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than the fact that the office sanctifies the holder of it." If there is a fall from grace half as degrading as that from chief justice to jailbird, I have yet to come across it. I cannot bring myself to rejoice in the man's downfall, for my imagination cannot wrap itself around such a wretched and contemptible fate.
Human psychology feeds off its own misery, and what can be more reassuring to one's ego than watching the decline and fall of giants? In a kinder, gentler world, such a sentence would be accompanied with the horror and regret it deserves, but our times are not kind, and our ways no gentler than a hornets' nest.
Clearly, it is this venomous element of disgrace which has set tongues wagging about this court case, but "respectability" demands that people find softer, less threatening reasons for taking an interest in it. Such is our hypocrisy, we cannot even own up to our cruel and spiteful natures.
To have little and lose little is no embarrassment, but to hold sway over men's lives and then be undone so completely is a humiliation which bears the hallmarks of parable. Here is mythology in the making. MrArrigo was a man who walked the corridors of power. He had the ear and the favour of statesmen, and his words could blot out reputations and ruin lives.
Years later, here is the same man, guilty of trading in influence and accepting bribe money, being carted off to prison in the back of a rented van.
As boxer Robert Fitzsimmons observed so prophetically in 1900, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall".
It has been written: They sat on a high seat, and snipped the robe of justice by the hem, but now they lie with folded feet, and the worms out-argue them. If this is the sort of justice our world needs, then let's have more of it.