It’s easy to make an example of Walter Noble.

One of Maine’s most notorious driving scofflaws has now been sentenced to prison for his recent roadway misbehavior. Drunken driving. Driving on a revoked license. Just driving, period, after losing the privilege in 1968.

Noble, we’ve pointed out, is beyond rehabilitation. His record of infractions is longer than Route 1 from Lubec to Kittery, and his dismissal of Maine laws as entrenched, and frustrating, as a summertime traffic jam in Ogunquit.

Given the attention on driving scofflaws in the wake of a fatal turnpike crash caused by a trucker with an equally disastrous record, Noble’s continued refusal to abide by Maine’s driving laws made him an appropriate target for vigorous prosecutorial attention.

That’s exactly what he got. On top of a five-year prison sentence levied in Franklin County, the court in Kennebec County plopped an additional 10-year sentence for Noble’s drunken driving arrest in Winthrop. It was a one-two punch of punitive appropriateness.

Because, sometimes, punishment must fit the crime. How we punish, as a society, is a crystalline reflection of our values. As a culture, for example, we are lenient to victims of circumstance or prejudice, and embrace such mitigating factors when levying judgment against offenders we deem “innocent.”

Those who display blatant remorselessness, such as Noble, receive no such leeway. Folks like him are object lessons, warnings to others who may try to engage in similar antisocial behavior.

But as cases like Noble’s come to a close, and the warm glow of a “justice served” settles over prosecutors and populace, new opportunities for justice arise. The new rising cases are those of Samantha Montana and Ryan Brissette, who have been implicated in the fatal Dec. 24 crash in Poland.

Their guilt has yet to be proven. Montana is accused of loaning her vehicle to an intoxicated driver, who later caused the collision that killed himself and five others, while Brissette allegedly hosted the gathering at his Poland home that provided alcohol to underage persons.

They pleaded not guilty on Thursday, and so are still presumed innocent. Neither has anything near the record sported by Noble.

And, like Noble, they are charged with common infractions. Montana and Brissette are not the first young people charged with making bad decisions where alcohol is involved. Often, charges like these punish youthful indiscretions, in which nobody was hurt, but the potential for harm existed.

In the Poland case, though, six lives were lost. It highlights the need for prosecution to send the message about what alleged errors in judgment can cause, and the consequences for them. No mitigating factors should apply if they are found guilty of these charges.

Consider it the corollary to Noble, who despite years of lawbreaking, never set a tragedy into motion: Whether the first offense, or the hundredth, lawbreaking must be followed with appropriate, and just, consequences.

Especially when the seriousness of the crimes requires stiff punishments.