Judge revisits Madoff's 150-year sentence

NEW YORK, June 28 (UPI) -- A 150-year prison sentence for investment fraud mastermind Bernard Madoff resulted from a decision not to compromise, the sentencing judge said.

"Splitting the baby, to me, was sending the wrong message. Often that's the easy way out, but as we know from the old parable, that wasn't the right thing to do," Judge Denny Chin said in an interview published in The New York Times Tuesday.

In an interview over the phone, Madoff, who ran a Ponzi scheme for decades that lost $65 billion for thousands of investors, called his 150-year term "virtually" a death sentence.

"I mean serial killers get a death sentence, but that's virtually what he gave me," Madoff said.

"I'm surprised Chin didn't suggest stoning in the public square."

But Chin said as he discussed the sentencing with interns on his staff, the suggestion that Madoff be given a 75-year sentence, half the maximum allowed, was a compromise that would have sent the wrong message.

Sentencing is a balancing act, the judge said.

Madoff was 71 years old when sentenced. His lawyer, Ira Lee Sorkin, had suggested a 12-year sentence would have been one year short of Madoff's life expectancy.

In the end, Chin wrote in his ruling that, "One of the traditional notions of punishment is that an offender should be punished in proportion to his blameworthiness."

An offender should be "punished according to his moral culpability," the judge wrote.

And even in court, while Madoff told victims he was suffering from "horrible guilt," Chin said, "I did not believe he was genuinely remorseful."

Almost two years to the day after the stunning 150-year term was meted out by Chin -- and two years past the point where an apology might do him any good -- Madoff said the sentencing was part of "the mob psychology of the time."