White Collar Justice

We have blogged previously about this case and the misconduct of the DOJ. With this decision, the DoJ revised it's standards and the odious Thompson Memo. The WSJ Op/Ed has this to say:

Congratulations to Lewis D. Kaplan, the federal judge whose withering critique of prosecutorial abuse in the KPMG tax-shelter case was vindicated yesterday by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

In fact, you can double that applause, because yesterday the Justice Department went further and once again rewrote its white-collar prosecution guidelines to accommodate Judge Kaplan's demolition. Whether Justice anticipated its legal defeat before the surrender is less important than the fact that it has now restored a measure of due process fairness to corporate defendants and their employees.

"...this does not mean that the Sentencing Guidelines for white-collar crimes should be a black stain on common sense."

For these two brothers common sense prevailed:

Two brothers facing 30 years to life under federal sentencing guidelines for their roles in a securities fraud scheme received five-year sentences Thursday.

In departing downward from the minimum recommended sentence by 25 years, Eastern District of New York Judge Frederic Block issued a 21-page opinion -- the longest sentencing memorandum of the senior judge's career -- highly critical of the guidelines' "fetish with absolute arithmetic."

"[W]e now have an advisory guidelines regime where, as reflected by this case, any officer or director of virtually any public corporation who has committed securities fraud will be confronted with a guidelines calculation either calling for or approaching lifetime imprisonment," Block wrote in People v. Parris, 05-CR-636.