Legal News

Good News For Bernie: He Won?t Serve Eight Centuries

By Ashby Jones

Yeah, it’s been about, oh, 24 hours since we last wrote about Bernie Madoff’s sentencing, slated for Monday, and we just can’t wait any longer to hit at it again. It’s a fix and we need it.

For starters, a sartorial story: The judge presiding over the matter, Denny Chin, earlier today ruled that Madoff will be allowed to appear at his sentencing in street clothes, rather than the Metropolitan Correctional Center’s standard-issue outfit. Click here for the Reuters story. (Frankly, were we Bernie, we might feel a little torn over this. On the one hand, sure, might as well try to hang onto any last remaining shreds of dignity by donning a natty suit. At the same time, we’d imagine he’s just going to have to change out of it pretty soon after the hearing, which would be sort of annoying. Undo the cufflinks, take off the tie, put the shoe-trees back in, etc.)

Our second piece of business: Forbes today has a nice piece about the longest white-collar sentences in history. Interestingly, while Madoff “may have confessed to the largest investment fraud in history,” the article’s author, Liz Moyer, writes it “doesn’t mean he’ll get the longest white-collar sentence when he faces a federal judge on June 29.”

According to the story, if Chin decides to hand down the maximum allowed by statute — 150 years — it would still be only the fourth-longest sentence handed down in recent years to a white-collar defendant.

That brings us to Sholman Weiss, currently serving the longest federal sentence for a white-collar crime. In 2000 a Florida judge sent him away for about eight-and-a-half centuries (845 years) for the $450 million collapse of National Heritage Life Insurance. According to Forbes, the Bureau of Prisons lists his release date as Nov. 23, 2754. (Note to future generations, if you’re able to bring us out of our cryogenically frozen state a couple days before that, we’ll promise to blog Weiss’s release.)

According to Forbes, such long sentences are rare for white-collar defendants, and more typical al for violent offenders. But the current era, one of big white-collar fraud and investment swindles, has increased judges’ “fervor for example-setting.” Says lawyer and sentencing expert Alan Ellis: “More and more judges are citing economic danger.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 24, 2009 (boomark / email).