Twenty years is a very long time.  A very, very long time.  Make no mistake about it.  It’s looooonnnngggg.  Back in the old days, a sentence of 20 years was the length one received for a murder.  That’s right, a murder.  The type of thing where a person deliberately took the life of another human being.  Why?  Because it was a very long time.

Everything changed with Bernie Madoff.  Suddenly, 20 years seems like a gift.  A slap on the wrist.  Easy time.  Soft. 

Marc Dreier was sentenced by Judge Jed Rakoff yesterday to 20 years in prison for stealing somewhere between $400 and $700 million dollars.  That’s a lot of money.  A couple of years ago, we would be asking how any lawyer could steal so much money, but today it falls far short of shocking.

Jonathon Streeter, who spoke on behalf of our government, asked Judge Rakoff to sentence Dreier to 145 years.  According to the New York Times, Rakoff wasn’t impressed.

“Mr. Dreier is not going to get much sympathy from this court,” Judge Rakoff said, “but he is not Mr. Madoff from any analysis, and that’s why I can’t understand why the government is asking for 145 years.”

Perhaps I can help the judge to understand.  It’s because Madoff is the new gold standard of care for federal sentencing.  If you care about the victims, then this would be the sentence to impose.  If you care to send a message, then this is the message to send. 

The problem with Madoff is that a sentence that falls short of the bar sends a message as well.  The message here is that the victims of Marc Dreier are less worthy than Bernie’s.  The message is for would-be thieves is that it’s open season on massive fraud again.  Woo hoo!

No, neither of these reflect the messages that Judge Rakoff intended, nor the messages that anyone should take from the Dreier sentence.  Rather, they reflect the distortion caused by the Bernie Scale.  Under any other circumstance, the sentence imposed on Marc Dreier would have been perceived as severe.  Remember, 20 years is a very long time.  It’s only in comparison to Bernie that this sentence pales.  Every sentence will be assessed by the Bernie Scale from now on.

At the end, Marc Dreier was a sad, pathetic man.  He attended Yale College and Harvard Law School.  It might be time to consider these institutions to be a negative, given how fragile Dreier’s self esteem appeared.  He was a product of an era when fabulously successful lawyers were the mere handmaidens of financial bonus babies.  A lackluster trader got a bigger bonus than the gross revenue a hard-working head of firm could anticipate, even with a blue-blood educational pedigree.  No wonder Dreier felt like such a loser.

Judge Rakoff’s sentence, unlike the one Judge Chin imposed on Bernie, was clearly meant to give Dreier the hope of walking out of prison one day.  Rakoff wrangled a concession from Streeter that a 30 year sentence, like 145, was a life sentence.  He then imposed 20, which means 15 to 18 years at worst.  So Dreier will be done in his late 70s.  He should live that long, but he’ll be broke and broken.  That’s sufficient to serve the legitimate purposes of sentencing, right?  Well, at least it used to be.

A sentence of 20 years was once viewed as a harsh sentence.  A serious sentence.  A sentence that sent a message that a crime would not be tolerated, and that anyone convicted of that crime would see his life destroyed.  The seriousness of a 20 year sentence hasn’t changed at all.  The perception of it being harsh is now gone, barely registering on the Bernie Scale.

Sentencing will never again be viewed the same.  What will it take to send the next message.  Life plus cancer?