Not bad, merely ignorant. You're celebrating the incarceration of someone you presumably know very little about, all while searching for "true" victims ("perhaps the public?") to fuel your indignation.
This man has harmed quite a few people... or their insurance companies... which of course means harming of their customers, i.e. "us" (who can even afford insurance).
I know enough about Shkreli to consider him an awful, awful person. Do I need to know how much he loves his children, or something equally conceited and pointless?
No, no I don't.
EDIT: Oh, wait, you're one of those extremist libertarian types, aren't you? (At least judging by your most recent 5 comments).
EDIT: Look, if he hadn't been convicted of securities fraud, I would still be defending his rights as a... defendant, but now that he has been convicted, I don't feel sorry for him. (For ultimately unrelated reasons, as it turns out. I'm guessing I'm a bad person for that.)
That isn't what this trial is about. Just because you don't like someone because of one thing, doesn't mean they should be getting a harsh sentence for a separate crime (which apparently had no victims).
Perhaps instead of vilifying characters who break the not at all free market pharmaceutical industry, and name-calling people who espouse ideologies that conflict with your pre-existing beliefs, you should instead consider why a single guy was able to stir up so much trouble in your heavily regulated medical industry. Was it because there wasn't enough government to protect people? Or was it more likely due to an extremely high barrier to entry to the pharmaceutical industry imposed by the FDA? (And in other cases, excessive IP protections play a significant role).
I'll leave it as an exercise.
Unfair sentencing is just as much judicial malfeasance as is prosecutorial misconduct, unfair court trials or allegations. As citizens of America (which I assume, but do not know you to be) we should all champion fairness at ever level of the judicial process at all times, lest we ever find ourselves or our friends in the crosshairs of a court that we've allowed to give punitive sentencing to.
There are undoubtedly very good debates to be had on what might be considered a fair sentence for a crime of this nature, but if you're damning him for crimes completely disconnected from this case, then by definition you are championing an unfair sentence. That's the sort of thing that has allowed our judicial system to get away with so much unfair treatment in the past, and for all our sakes, we should root against it at every level.
This counts as personal attack and we ban people for that. In addition, it's not legit to use HN for ideological battle. (Irrespective of which flavors you're for or against.) So would you please not post like this again?
From where I sit, I do not see much difference between the man this article is about, and those enjoying schadenfreude at his expense. All are trapped in the same place.
Definitely going to be interesting to hear the judges words during sentencing. I was listening to the Michelle Carter sentencing yesterday, as I was following that relatively closely. Now I'm waiting to see what happens here, but this is much more cut and dry than that case. I'm only interested because it's Shkreli.
As a hedge fund manager, losing money is not illegal. The only illegal thing he did was lie about it so that he could get them their money back.
It would've been perfectly legal for him to lose all his clients money in the hedge fund, make them aware of this fact, and reap the profits from his pharma business without dishing it out to his hedge fund clients.
As far as I can tell, Shkreli turned a technically legal "I fucked up and lost your money scenario" into a technically illegal I fucked up, lost your money, but got it back to you scenario.
If I was part of Shkreli's hedge fund, I would much prefer to be involved in the latter scenario than the former.
Sure, I could sue Shkreli to recoup some of my hedge fund losses, but this way they didn't need to.
You're missing the point; giving his investors 'their' money back was the thing he did that was unethical and illegal. If you're a fund manager and the value of your portfolio goes down after making bad bets, you can't just inject your own money into the fund to make it look like you have a positive track record so that you can solicit more outside funds.
He took some of Retrophin investors profits and used it to pay back his investors in MSMB. Those profits should have gone to Retrophin investors.
From the perspective of the hedge fund, this is a pretty bad spot to be in. Retrophin investors will be looking to be made whole for the money Shkreli gave to MSMB investors.
I would imagine that this is how Ponzi schemes start.
In this case, because of the amount involved, the guidelines will call for a substantial prison sentence (well over 5 years). There is actually a loss table (again, we're talking about the "intended loss") that determines a certain number of points for the loss [1] (plus 7 points for the "base offense level"), and that number of points is then used with the sentencing table [2] to determine the sentence. The judge is of course free to depart up or down from the guideline sentence, but the sentencing range determined by those tables will be the starting point. The odds that he will receive no prison time at all after having gone to trial and lost are effectively zero. The judge will likely cut him some kind of break because nobody actually lost anything - his lawyers will argue that he showed remorse after the fact by eventually making his victims whole - but that will have a minor effect at best. My best guess, having watched many of these things play out, is 4-6 years.
[1] https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines/2016-guidelines-manual/2016-...
[2] https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines/2016-guidelines-manual/2016-...