If you're anything like us, you slept terribly last night, waking up precisely every 82 minutes in subconscious protest of the bizarrely harsh prison term nonviolent, wrong-way driver Nicole Richie was forced to serve between 3:15 p.m. and 4:17 p.m. early yesterday afternoon. Doing its civic responsibility, the LAT made the Sheriff's Department defend its decision to subject the famous inmate to an intolerable 82 minutes of cruelty, getting a spokesman on the record to claim that anyone in the same circumstance would get similarly brutal treatment:

On Thursday, [Los Angeles County Undersheriff Larry] Waldie said, 143 people facing charges similar to Richie's were freed early — 89 males and 54 females.

For the same charge as Richie's misdemeanor, Waldie said "the most anyone would spend in that process would be eight to 12 hours. The most."

We're going to do our best to accept the Sheriff's Department at their word that they weren't singling out Richie as an example because of her worldwide fame, hoping that finally letting the issue go might help our psychic wounds to heal. We don't want to spend the entire weekend deprived of sleep by last night's recurring nightmare, in which Lady Justice, allowing one eye to peek out from beneath her blindfold so that she can read an Us Weekly cover story about the progress of Nicole's prenancy, cackles, "If I have anything to say about it, that little bitch's baby is going to be delivered by the switchblade sisters in Cell Block D!" Even once peaceful sleep returns, we still fear that the sound of our Lady's discarded scales clattering to the floor to free up the gnarled hand with which she then greedily diddled herself will haunt us for the rest of our days.

• Officials defend Nicole Richie's release [LAT]