The New York Timeshas an article about the absurd sentence (150 years) Madoff received. Why is absurd? Not because he doesn’t deserve it. It’s absurd because Madoff was then 71 years old! Seems to me a good defense of flogging:
Judge Chin’s recollections resurrect all the anger, shock and confusion that surrounded Mr. Madoff’s crimes, and provide a rare peek at the excruciating pressure faced by a judge who had to balance the law, the public’s emotions and his own deeply held beliefs while meting out a sentence that was just and satisfied the court’s need to send a message.
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“I’m surprised Chin didn’t suggest stoning in the public square,” [Madoff said].
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Judge Chin noted in the interviews that 20 or 25 years would have effectively been a life sentence for Mr. Madoff, and any additional years would have been purely symbolic. Yet symbolism was important, he said, given the enormity of Mr. Madoff’s crimes.
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But he decided that a term of 150 years would send a loud and decisive message. He felt that Mr. Madoff’s “conduct was so egregious,” he said, “that I should do everything I possibly could to punish him.”
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By the time Judge Chin entered his chambers on the morning of Monday, June 29, he had decided what his draft was missing, he said. In explaining how the 150-year sentence was symbolically important, he had neglected to include a third, crucial reason: retribution.“A defendant should get his just deserts,” Judge Chin remembers thinking.
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Judge Chin read his passage on retribution, which, after the length of the sentence itself, appeared to have the greatest impact. In the headlines and news accounts that followed, the words “extraordinarily evil” seemed to be everywhere.
No rehab. No bettering of the soul. Punishment.
In New York, a 150-year sentence would, should Madoff live to be 221-years old, cost me and other good citizens of the Empire State more than $7 million. There has got to be a better way.