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Three cheers for the Seventh District Circuit Court, for doing (04/04) an excellent job of imposing justice. Krishnaswami Sriram admitted in Federal District Court that he had heavily defrauded the Medicare program — and the IRS for another $550,000.
The sentencing hearing took 13 days and resulted in a penalty of five years probation and restitution of $1,258. Prosecutors were more than disappointed. They appealed the sentence to the court of appeals and it was reversed by Judge Richard A.. Posner.
In that ruling, the appeals court cited that Sriram:
- billed for more than 24 hours in a day, on 401 days
- billed for days when he was out of the country.
- billed for services to dead patients.
- defrauded Medicare of a minimum of $1.4 million.
- was “Chronically inept as a businessman”
- did indeed spend a great deal of money on his defense.
The reversal of the sentence essentially quantified and qualified the problem of handing out a 2-year prison sentence to a petty crook who steals a car stereo … yet imposes a probationary sentence on someone who steals millions as a white collar criminal.
Posner’s court ruled that the district court made two errors. First, they underestimated the fraud “by at least a factor of a thousand;” second they decided upon a sentence “that would have been unreasonable even if his calculation of the loss had been defensible. “
While the defense had claimed that the amount of actual loss was $1,258, the appeals court believed that the loss was $1.4 million or more. The judge noted that the guidelines for the lesser sum would be 24-30 months in prison, so it should be substantially more for the greater sum — 78 to 97 months in prison. They also rendered the opinion that ” a defendant spends heavily on lawyers is not a mitigating factor. It would not only encourage overspending; it would be double counting, since the pricier the lawyer that a defendant hires, the less likely he is to be convicted and given a long sentence.”
In reversing the sentence and remanding the matter for re-sentencing, the court concluded, “the defendant committed fraud on a large scale and should be punished accordingly.”
© Copyright 2007 The John Cooke Fraud Report