Martin Shkreli was sentenced to 7 years in prison for fraud, and he wept while begging for mercy from the judge. I am a bad person for finding a grim sort of joy in that.
A courtroom sketch showing Martin Shkreli making statement in court weeping, during his sentencing while his defense lawyer Ben Brafman holds his head in his hands.
Happy Birthday, PZ.
An impassioned performance.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t sentenced for price gouging on life-saving medicine, which is what he’s probably most (in)famous for. Instead, he was busted for securities fraud, i.e. taking money from the already wealthy. The drug price stuff? Just business as usual.
The sad thing here is that he got 7 years for lying to investors, and none for hiking the prices of life-saving medications by 5000%.
The prescribed sentence was a few weeks but the judge marked it up 5,000%.
Not my joke but it’s a good one
That joke would be funnier had the judge not marked it down to 7 years instead of the 14 the prosecution was asking for.
I share your grim joy, PZ. It’s about time something wiped that ugly smirk off his face. It’s a pity the sentence is so light.
Happy Birthday!
As usual, the scandal lies in what is permitted, rather than what is not.
Perhaps the prison will charge him $750 per roll of toilet paper while he stays with them.
Governor Scott in Florida also signed a (weak) gun control bill into law today, Florida governor signs gun control bill dubbed ‘baby step’ by students. The NRA mass-murder fetish cult is frothing at the mouth, unlike the Parkland students & their allies. (An explanation of the law, Florida Gun Bill: What’s in It, and What Isn’t.)
Oh schadenfreude why are you so delicious.
The moral here is that if you rip off the wealthy you WILL face justice.
I’ve said it elsewhere, but I highly recommend, for those who have Netflix, the episode of Alex Gibney’s six-part series Dirty Money called “Drug Short,” about Valeant Pharmaceuticals.*
* (And all of the other episodes as well.)
Oh, and Happy Birthday, PZ!
And sleazy pickup artist Richard La Runina’s dating sim has been dropped from PS4. What a happy day.
Happy Birthday, PZ. I see you are quoted in today’s Word of the Day:
https://wordsmith.org/words/today.html
I was at the gym today and saw that on one of the TVs, and I just did a spit take and burst out laughing, then I gave a big Simpsons Nelson style “HAHA!” and pointed at the TV, and then turned around to see people staring at me. So I just walked back to my set chuckling and whispering, sweet justice…
Zorionak, PZ.
I really wish the absolute worst for Shkreli, and you have no idea of what that might entail. If you’re bad, I’m absolutely horrible.
But I’m sure “Martin’s fine” with that.
Is he going to a proper, for-profit American prison where he will be used as slave labor?
or is he going to some white-collar thing with tennis courts?
I guess I just don’t understand taking pleasure in someone else’s suffering. Maybe I’m defective. But, ya know – and I’m really not trying to get all SJW and preachy – but… imprisonment is torture. In extraordinary situations where a person’s freedom is a constant danger to anyone around them, I can understand prison being the only measure. But there’s other ways we could ensure Shkreli doesn’t present a danger to the public anymore, without making the man suffer unnecessarily.
Again, I don’t want to preach. I get why people hate the guy and everything he stands for. And I know no one wants to waste their empathy on someone who’s never shown any. I just honestly think it sucks. I just wish we could get away from retribution and punishment as our model for justice. Because it heaps suffering on top of suffering. I’d much rather see a restorative justice approach.
Adam James:
What? Not being able to sufficiently apply theory of mind to others is not necessarily being defective.
In this case, it’s basically satisfaction that (a) it’s deserved, (b) it could hardly have happened to a nicer person. But hey, I too lack many sentiments commonly thought of as natural. No biggie.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetic_justice
(BTW, Al Capone famously was convicted of income tax evasion; cf. the general sentiment above about his more opprobrious offending which remains unpunished)
—
In the taxonomy of punishments, it’s a fair way away from torture — not all prisons are torture dungeons, though all torture dungeons are prisons.
(cf. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/28/first-senior-saudi-prince-freed-imprisonment-ritz-carlton-hotel/)
And thank you for expressing your view, so that I might address it. Really.
[meta]
PS Adam, have you noted the lack of allusion to the prison rape meme, despite the evident satisfaction hitherto expressed? This is not your typical blog.
PPS
You can’t restore pain suffered or angst experienced or loss of non-fungible things.
(Your expectation is foolish, unless you imagine there’s a calculus of rewards ex post facto that balance out the previous losses; cf. the theodicy of the Biblical Book of Job, which matches your narrative, wicked as it may be)
Considering how many people Punchable Face sentenced to death by making their medication unaffordable, I’m fine with him bawling over getting seven years.
I wish there were like/hate buttons here! Ijs
I hope he gets killed in prison.
Not because of poetic justice, but because humanity would be better without him, because many dead people would be alive without him, because if he dies he will no longer be able to destroy others.
I personally would have been far happier if that sociopath Shkreli had been completely stripped of his net worth of $20M. A $7.4M fine still leaves him a “winner” in the criminal financial gains department.
Shame there’s no video of the bro tears.
#28 zetopan:
No doubt civil litigation of various kinds will follow the criminal verdict to strip him of all the money he still owns.
People who do bad things should not get better results from doing bad things than the people who don’t do bad things get.
If that doesn’t make sense to you, I think you’re right.
when I stop and think about it I do not feel glad that this martin guy is going to jail, I feel sad. Sad that he is so fucked up it led to this, sad for all the people he hurt and even sad for all those he cheated. I am also sad that we do not at this time have any way to reliably “rehabilitate” him. He knew when he started out that it could end this way.
It is positive in one way that sometimes the rich criminals get convicted and not just the poor.
uncle frogy
Adam James @21: Being incarcerated for committing a crime is not, in and of itself, torture. Many of the conditions of incarceration as they currently exist could certainly be, and should be, deemed torturous. Those conditions are allowed to exist and indeed encouraged to become worse because incarcerated peoples in the US are, by and large, considered disposable due to the demographics they represent– racial minorities, poor, mentally ill, addicts. This is wrong.
The incredibly wealthy rarely find themselves being held accountable for their actual bad actions in the same way marginalized peoples are held “accountable” for equal or much lesser offenses and for offenses they didn’t even commit. It’s the flipping of the usual business in Shkreli’s case that people see as cause for a moment of schadenfreude, not the fact that prison conditions are allowed and encouraged to be abominable, and yes, torturous, for most incarcerated demographics. Someone’s affluenza didn’t completely shield them for once. Yeah, it didn’t shield him not because he attempted to condemn hundreds of thousands of poor people with allergies to death but because he had the audacity to defraud his wealthy peers, but in this instance, I’ll take it.
Adam James @21:
On the contrary. You’re exceptional rather than defective. If there were more like you (and fewer like Shkreli, of course), there might be hope for our nasty little species.
@27: “but because humanity would be better without him”
Humanity would be better without anyone wishing other people to be killed. When are you going to commit suicide?
Good. 7 years is not enough, and as others have said, it sucks that precisely zero seconds of his sentence are for what he did to fuck ordinary people over, but it’s something.
Now feel free to tone-troll about what an awful person I am, but i really hope he suffers in there…and I hope he loses EVERYTHING when he gets out and has to try and live as an ex-con with nothing looking for work. That will be his real punishment. Fuck this asshole and may he spend the rest of his life suffering; it’s still not going to make up for what he did.
Today something that was difficult and painful happened on another blog I follow and I will not name because of the mutual animosity between here and there. It took fortitude. I myself would be intimidated to be that forthright given the suit PZ and others are faced with on another case. So kudos to that proclamation a certain someone just made today.
Probably coincidental to PZ’s birthday given rifting issues. Sad.
hemidactylus @37: I really don’t get the point of being so cryptic. Do you mean this?
Happy Birthday, PZ!
@mnb0 #35 do you want me dead?
Shkreli has what is referred to as “a shit eating grin”. Maybe his time is prison will remove it.