Why?

what a waste, in so many ways. something is wrong with a system that allows this to happen.

Because the law is an ass and most the people in authority are unfit. I include the majority of people in our state legislatures as well as those in the United States Congress.

To wit:

A slight perusal of the laws by which the measures of vindictive and coercive justice are established will discover so many disproportions between crimes and punishments, such capricious distinctions of guilt, and such confusion of remissness and severity as can scarcely be believed to have been produced by public wisdom, sincerely and calmly studious of public happiness.

Samuel Johnson