The Securities and Exchange Commission unveiled conspiracy charges against brokerage firm Cohmad Securities and four individuals with securities fraud in association with Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, the Washington Post reports.
Cohmad is being charged as providing “feeder funds” into Madoff’s decades-long scam that defrauded thousands of investors out of billions of dollars.
Madoff, who faces sentencing today in a Manhattan court, claims to have acted alone. However, authorities doubt that claim, and are attempting to file charges against all members of the monumental conspiracy.
Madoff, who pleaded guilty to 11 charges on March 12, could face 150 years in prison for his role in the securities fraud, and may have to pay back as much as $171 billion, according to CNN.
Madoff’s defense attorney has asked the judge for a 12 year sentence.
Read more..
Archive for June, 2009
The Seventh Circuit had some interesting commentary on a number of different sentencing factors in United States v. Presbitero (Nos. 07-1129, 07-1610, & 07-1712). Writing for the court, Judge Williams affirmed Presbitero’s conviction of tax offenses, reinstated a codefendant’s conviction, and remanded for resentencing in order to determine whether Presbitero qualified for a leadership enhancement under the sentencing guidelines. Judge Williams concluded by addressing the government’s arguments that the district court took impermissible factors into account when it sentenced Presbitero to a below-guidelines sentence.
First, the Seventh Circuit agreed with the government that the expense and stress of protracted litigation could not be considered as a mitigating factor for Presbitero. Since Presbitero spent almost ten years (!) defending charges brought by the government, it is hard to see how anyone could qualify for a sentence reduction based on the burdens of protracted litigation if he does not. The court cited concerns about encouraging defendants to overspend on expensive lawyers as a reason not to treat litigation costs as a mitigating factor. There would also be equitable concerns in giving a sentence benefit to defendants ... Read more..
Irene’s post and Kali’s post got me thinking: What is it that interests me about copyright law? The answer is somewhat surprising, given that I specialize in copyright law: nothing, per se. I’m not especially attracted to the doctrine of copyright law more than a number of other subjects, such as torts or contracts or even securities regulation. Indeed, as cocktail party conversation goes, I always cringe a little when I say I specialize in copyright, because it often leads to a discussion of some particular controversy in which I am forced to admit at the end that I have no idea what the answer is, as the statute is vague and there are cases on both sides (or maybe no cases at all). At least there are answers to what constitutes insider trading.
What interests me about copyright is not copyright law in itself, but copyright law as a subject. Over the past few years, I’ve come to realize that my interest in copyright law and Internet law predates law school. It’s part of my general interest in ideological transitions, ... Read more..
William Safire reported in a recent column that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has a pronounced distaste for bad writing. She wants the briefs she reads to be written properly, and she believes in carefully crafting opinions. In particular, Sotomayor says, “the unnecessary use of the passive voice” causes her “to blister.”
When I was a young man, I worked briefly as a journalist, and all of my editors argued the active voice was a more direct and vigorous mode of expression. The passive voice, they insisted, denied human agency by sticking a helping verb such as “is” or “was” between the subject of a sentence and an action verb. Since becoming a legal academic, I have noticed the passive voice everywhere I look in legal prose, and I have struggled (with limited success) to stop the passive voice’s creeping incursion in my own writing.
Why is the passive voice so common in legal writing? It would be too simple, I think, to say lawyers are lousy writers. Surely we are no worse than accountants, bankers, doctors, and track coaches. Perhaps the ... Read more..
When you are at your Fourth of July cookout or fireworks display this week, see if anyone mentions the Declaration of Independence. If they do, ask “which Declaration of Independence?” After all, there are more than one.
In her 1997 book American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, historian Pauline Maier describes the events leading up to July 4, 1776 and points to multiple “other” Declarations of Independence issued by local legislative bodies earlier that year. Declarations were issued in a variety of places, including Buckingham County (Virginia), Charles County (Maryland), and Natick, Massachusetts. In most cases, these “other” Declarations took the form of instructions from the citizens of a particular geographic area to their elected representatives in the state legislature or in the Continental Congress. After recounting the unjustified treatment of the colonies by the Crown, these documents authorize the peoples’ representatives to vote in favor of severing ties with England. However, some of these Declarations take a different form, such as a judge instructing a grand jury on the source of their legal authority in the absence of a ... Read more..
