It’s hard to pick out, in the world we live in, the greatest of all farces. But, certainly, a top-tier candidate would be the repeated, mind-numbing instances when a Wall Street financier or a big bank pays a massive fine to avoid litigation but is allowed to present the fiction that it did nothing wrong. Everyone knows the law was violated. But, only the big fish get to pretend like it never happened. Well, maybe there is a very tiny crack in the facade of these farces, which could bring, some day, the practice to an end.

The litany of these farces is long.  Just to mention a few cases where the big shots skated, paid a huge fine out of corporate treasuries, never admitted guilt and left shareholders holding the bag: Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan Chase (though, as I wrote a couple of days ago, JPMorgan and CEO Jamie Dimon may not be out of the woods yet).

But, some judges are not happy with the whole charade:

A federal judge said he needed more time to consider approval of hedge-fund firm SAC Capital Advisers LP’s attempt to settle a government insider-trading lawsuit by paying $602 million without acknowledging any wrongdoing.

“There is something counterintuitive and incongruous,” U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero said at a hearing in Manhattan federal court, “in a party agreeing to settle a case for $600 million—that might cost $1 million to defend and litigate—if it truly did nothing wrong.”

You think? Marrero is not the only one:

It echoed another high-profile setback for the agency in 2011, when a federal judge rejected its $285 million settlement of civil fraud charges against Citigroup Inc. U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff refused to approve the pact, in which the bank didn’t have to admit wrongdoing, saying it was “neither fair, nor reasonable, nor adequate, nor in the public interest.”

…An appeals court currently is reviewing whether Judge Rakoff exceeded his judicial authority by refusing to green light the 2011 settlement. In March 2012, a panel of the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals said the case raised “important questions,” though it hinted that it was likely to rule against the judge. The panel said at the time that it wasn’t “the proper function of federal courts to dictate policy to executive administrative agencies.” A decision on the 2011 settlement is expected in the coming months.

This is a simple issue. These charades essentially set up two sets of rules: one for the rich and powerful, and one for the rest of the people. The simple test on whether these deals are moral in a democratic society, where the rule of law is often touted as a symbol of virtue, is to ask a straightforward question: do regular people who commit serious crimes, or even minor ones, get to pay off the government and, then, go into the world saying they did nothing wrong?

The answer is obvious. The farce should stop.