uow. Ore Martin!!Chfare bere?!
Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison
261–270 of 446 posts
Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison
#262Harsh sentence for a case where all the money was paid back.
Especially given that the funnelling other money to cover the losses happened after some investors and the SEC were already on to the fraud.
Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison
#263Is he getting a comfy white collar prison sentence? Also, not to be that guy, but I hope he gets beat daily by other inmates. Edit: jk, totally being that guy.
> Also, not to be that guy,
You know, if you feel the need to write this, it's a good sign that you should not write whatever it would come with. Because it's guaranteed that if you do, you will, in fact, be that guy.
Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison
#264To give some background on how his sentencing increased so dramatically, initially he was convicted but since no one lost any money his sentencing guidelines were 0-12 months(most likely no jail time since it was his first offence). As a general rule of thumb in federal fraud cases sentencing is primarily determined by the what's called the "loss amount" of the crime in question. But a couple weeks ago the judge deci…
> To give some background on how his sentencing increased so dramatically It didn't increase. His sentence was never anything else. > initially he was convicted but since no one lost any money his sentencing guidelines were 0-12 months(most likely no jail time since it was his first offence). False again. When the sentencing phase began, his lawyers argued there were no legal losses caused by his fraud, and prosecuto…
Interesting! From your [0] link:
"The Second Circuit repeatedly has held that “loss in fraud cases includes the amount of property taken, even if all or part has been returned.”"
"(Rejecting the defendant’s argument that the value of his fraud victim’s equity in his partnership should be subtracted from the loss amount, and holding that “[t]he ‘loss’ was the money that the investors were fraudulently induced to invest ...irrespective of the value of the [property].”)"
"The Sentencing Guidelines provide for specific “Credits Against Loss,” whereby loss calculations may be reduced by, inter alia, “[t]he money returned . . . by the defendant to the victim before the offense was detected.” The Guidelines define “time of detection” for purposes of credit against loss as “the earlier of (I) the time the offense was discovered by a victim or government agency; or (II) the time the defendant knew or reasonably should have known that the offense was detected or about to be detected by a victim or government agency."
Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison
#265To give some background on how his sentencing increased so dramatically, initially he was convicted but since no one lost any money his sentencing guidelines were 0-12 months(most likely no jail time since it was his first offence). As a general rule of thumb in federal fraud cases sentencing is primarily determined by the what's called the "loss amount" of the crime in question. But a couple weeks ago the judge deci…
> the judge decided to come up with a HYPOTHETICAL loss The judge issued a 96-page opinion [1] that details his crimes and the sentencing guidelines. It was not an off-the-cuff decision as you're suggesting. > This seems beyond absurd and as far as I know has no precedence. Your lack of knowledge on a subject does not make it absurd. [1] https://martinshkrelilacksjudgment.files.wordpress.com/2018/...
I never suggested the judges decision was off the cuff, you just made that up. I simply stated that he is doing 7 years for a $10.4M hypothetical loss that never happened.
Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison
#266He was so obnoxious that I guess it is easy to be happy about that, but he was so small time in the grand scheme of things. But nearly no bankers responsible for the 2008 financial crisis ever went to jail: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/how-wal...
> But nearly no bankers responsible for the 2008 financial crisis ever went to jail
That is a myth. Dozens of bankers were arrested and put in prison over crimes related to the 2008 financial crisis. That includes a number of bankers at large enterprises. It excludes the very top tier bankers, at the systemically important financial firms, who all managed to skate.
It's not illegal, generally speaking, to make dumb investment decisions, and or to take a lot of risk, and lose money. The responsibility for the 2008 financial crisis is spread across both the public and private sector, from Congress & multiple Presidents to the Federal Reserve to hundreds of banks, thousands of bankers, and tens of thousands of mortgage brokers and realtors. Spurred on by low interest rates, it was collective financial insanity that millions of people willfully, cheerfully, participated in.
"The idea that no bankers went to prison for crimes related to the financial crisis is a myth, according to the watchdog overseeing the federal government's bailout fund. There have been 35 bankers sentenced to prison, said Christy Goldsmith Romero, the special inspector general for the Troubled Assets Relief Program (SIGTARP), in a report to Congress released Thursday."
"There have been 59 bankers convicted of crimes, including two executives at NOVA Bank in Philadelphia who were convicted on Wednesday of fraud conspiracy related to TARP funds. An additional 19 bankers have been charged with crimes, with many awaiting trials."
http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/28/news/companies/bankers-priso...
Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like it or hate it, this is what the SEC does. You think Martha Stewart deserved jail time for making 50k in an insider trading scheme she didn't really care about? The SEC finds very public cases and then brings the hammer down in order to act a deterrent. Martin Shkreli broke the law, something he didn't have to do. It isn't like it was mob justice and some hugely biased jury convicted him of all the crimes he was…
So what you are saying is that he had his sentance increased because he hurt a judge's feelings? That's basically what this comes down to. Imagine if jay walking was punishable by death but it was only ever enforced against people who mocked Trump. Inconsistent enforcement just allows the people in power to go after their political oponents for the "real" crime of hurting their feelings.
> That's basically what this comes down to.
The judge didn't create the law regarding securities fraud, nor did she instigate the charges of fraud, nor did she even have a voice when it came to deciding to convict (it was a jury trial). So how does this all boil down to a judge's feelings being hurt?
All crimes will be inconsistently enforced until we've built a policing apparatus that operates like the equivalent of red-light cameras but for every crime [0]. Hopefully we never get to that point, which means enforcement will continue to be resource-limited and inconsistent, so are you arguing for no enforcement at all?
[0] I'm being rhetorical of course. I don't mean to suggest at all that the enforcement of red-light violations, even when caught on camera, is anywhere near consistent: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/redlight/ct-met-...
Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the outrage was ever about Shkreli not saving someone's life. It was about Shkreli making lots of money from people's suffering, after artificially inflating the price of a drug that he controlled. In other words, getting rich from increasing the amount of misery in this world.
> In other words, getting rich from increasing the amount of misery in this world. This is the fallacy. He didn't get rich from increasing the amount of misery in the world . He didn't give people toxoplasmosis. He got rich from not doing something he could do ( i.e. sell drugs more cheaply) to decrease the amount of misery. Which is the exact same thing you do when you buy a Macbook Pro instead of donating the money…
Intention matters. Your argument is purely utilitarian.
Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the judge decided to come up with a HYPOTHETICAL loss The judge issued a 96-page opinion [1] that details his crimes and the sentencing guidelines. It was not an off-the-cuff decision as you're suggesting. > This seems beyond absurd and as far as I know has no precedence. Your lack of knowledge on a subject does not make it absurd. [1] https://martinshkrelilacksjudgment.files.wordpress.com/2018/...
I never suggested the judges decision was off the cuff, you just made that up. I simply stated that he is doing 7 years for a $10.4M hypothetical loss that never happened.
Are you saying that the investors money was not actually taken under false pretenses? Because the legal rule, based on precedent, applied was that the value fradulently taken (whether or not later returned) is the “loss amount” for sentencing purposes.
Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison
#270It does say something depressing about our laws that he got sent to prison for the thing where he lied to rich people while still making them money rather than the thing where he extorted sick poor people...which is still fully legal even if the majority of society thinks it shouldn't.
He didn’t “extort sick poor people”, he extorted insurance companies. If you couldn’t afford his drugs, he was offering them for free.
He played a zero sum game where he profited by imposing an incremental tax on the buyers of health insurance, the common public.