Madoff Suicide Highlights U.S. Criminal Justice System Gone Awry

The recent headlined news story of the apparent suicide of Mark Madoff, the son of Wall Street wheeler dealer Bernie Madoff who is now serving a 150 year prison term in North Carolina for securities fraud, serves to remind many Americans of a U.S. criminal justice system gone astray.

A tragedy, and one in which the media and government most likely had a hand in this young man's fall, although the complete details and coroner's report has yet to be revealed.

Mr. Madoff senior bilked thousands of investors in his Ponzie scheme of a great deal of their wealth, from all reports, and was the mastermind of the scam and whose actions and activities were actually reported to authorities by his very own sons, although little has been revealed insofar as whether there was pressure also exerted on them to so do from governmental sources prior to his arrest.

Mark Madoff, from all reports, profited from his father's schemes, and was thus also then in the end targeted for investigation even after having been instrumental in his father's conviction.

The comments on most of the websites by the public have not been sympathetic, to say the least.

Which just goes to prove just how many in this country have truly lost their way in their understanding of the intent of our founders with respect to crimes such as these, which although heinous for the absolute thievery which occurred has not been adjudicated according to the "common law" provisions behind our criminal justice system in "letting the punishment fit the crimes," and in the government acting on behalf of the victims and not its self-serving ends since the punishments in so many crimes at both the criminal and civil levels are now statutory determined, rather than determined by juries of American citizen's peers.

The Madoff's, and all who profited from such schemes in this writer's view should have been henceforth precluded from ever serving in any fiduciary capacity with respect to other people's money from this day forward, and the spoils of their crimes seized and redistributed with interest to the victims of their greed and avarice.

Not the taxpayers having to now pay to jail and house Mr. Madoff in federal prison, and his son then "investigated" for the past several years, rather than concentrating on the crime itself and its victims and all parties' right to justice in a criminal fraud action, although by its very nature investing in Wall Street or the stock market clearly are risky ventures at best due to its "global" focus and composition again contrary to the intent of those founders for a "sovereign" U.S. economy.

Justice would mean recompense and precluding the perpetrators from ever being placed in such a position of trust and temptation ever again - since by their own actions proved through the "evidence" that their positions of trust were criminally abused.

Having to seek work in this now depressed U.S. economy in other fields of endeavor outside the financial sector, and losing all that they have gained at the expense of others with punitive damages added due to the nature of their crimes would have been the "legal" and "lawful" punishment called for.

Not years and years of "investigation," and subsequent media hounding - or innuendo without due process.

It was reported that Mark Madoff was found dead with his two year old child and his dog in the home where his body was discovered, with his true guilt or innocense still left undetermined although purportedly was still living a rather lavish lifestyle as a former employee of one of his father's commercial ventures, with authorities alerted by his wife who lived in another state and who had petitioned the court for a change of name for she and their son due to the continued ramifications of the crimes committed by Mark Madoff's father.

The press has been unforgiving. And the American public, most of whom were not even directly impacted by the senior Madoff's activities, just as unforgiving and brutal, although fundamentally all Americans have been impacted by the loosey goosey federal government's oversight of the Wall Street banks, bankers and profiteers.

Which governmental policies and practices in sufficient oversight of these Wall Street profiteers have remained for the most part unchanged fundamentally even since Bernie Madoff's arrest, and conviction.

Wake up, Washington. A two year old has just lost his father, and there is another Bernie Madoff trading his grandchild's future for a yacht.

Or just maybe, eventually, THIS grandchild might.