Concurring: Skilling’s Punishment Fits the Crime

Over at Concurring Opinions, Dave Hoffman summarizes the “outraged” responses to Jeff Skilling’s twenty-four year sentence and voices his disagreement (he argues that the punishment fits the crime).  I couldn’t agree with Dave more.  Perhaps my days in practice are showing, but I have little to no sympathy in this instance, given the extent and magnitude of the fraud.

I was going to try to describe my own sense of outrage at the leniency that has typically been shown fraudsters (as opposed to other types of theft or drug dealing) and realized that much of what I was going to write had, in the words of the band Barenaked Ladies, “been done before.”  Without being too banal, I suppose it boils down to social class, race, and the artificial abstraction of harm associated with white collar crime.