Fascinating review of recent white-collar sentencing realities

I just noticed this Bloomberg news story detailing some of the sentencing realities of the modern assault on corporate crime.  The story is headlined “Bush Fraud Probes Jail Corporate Criminals Less Than Two Years,” and here some lengthy excerpts from a very interesting piece:

Sixty-one percent of defendants sentenced in the Bush administration’s crackdown on corporate fraud spent no more than two years in jail, escaping the stiff penalties given WorldCom Inc. and Enron Corp. executives. In the past five years, 28 percent of those sentenced got no prison time and 6 percent received 10 years or more, according to a review of 1,236 white-collar convictions….

A wave of corporate corruption marked by Enron’s collapse in 2001 and an accounting scandal at WorldCom led Congress to enact harsher penalties. President George W. Bush signed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to reform governance and named a Corporate Fraud Task Force to push “significant” prosecutions….

Defendants got reduced jail time when they helped prosecutors investigate frauds, served as low- or mid-level executives, or committed crimes that were less sophisticated than complex accounting conspiracies, the review by Bloomberg News found….Of the 1,236 convictions from 2002 to 2007 in the review, 1,133 defendants were sentenced. Forty-seven percent of those got a year or less in prison….

The Justice Department claimed credit for 1,236 convictions in the crackdown on corruption. The department says it doesn’t have a comprehensive list.  Bloomberg assembled a comparable list based on more than 350 cases from task force annual reports, lists of executives, and press releases on the department’s Web site….

Joan Meyer, who oversees the task force as senior counsel to the deputy attorney general, argues that any prison sentence can serve as a deterrent. “Every case can’t be an Enron,” Meyer says. “The question is, do we give a pass to white-collar defendants because their crimes are non-violent and result in lesser sentences? That would be an abdication of our responsibilities.”…

At least 129 defendants cooperated with prosecutors, court records show.  The number may be higher, lawyers say, because public files don’t always reflect whether a judge credited a defendant for helping the government…..  Judges weigh a crime’s nature, the amount of financial loss and a defendant’s circumstances in sentencing. Offenders who plead guilty tend to get less time than those who go to trial. 

Defendants are penalized for not accepting responsibility for their crime, while those convicted at trial may be held accountable for the full loss in a fraud.  Of 193 defendants convicted at trial, 38 got 10 years or more….  “The idea that somebody who goes to trial and gets hammered while people who plead guilty get far less time smacks of the Inquisition,” says defense attorney John Keker of Keker & Van Nest in San Francisco. “I think it’s a disgrace.  The going-to-trial penalty should be an embarrassment to judges everywhere.”…