A suburban doctor who became tangled in the corruption investigation surrounding ousted Gov. Rod Blagojevich was sentenced Wednesday to 18 months in prison for hiding $3 million in income from a tax collector.
Dr. Robert Weinstein, 64, of Northbrook was also fined $75,000 for failing to report the income. He originally claimed it was a gift but later admitted it represented the proceeds of a scheme to siphon money out of a charitable organization.
Weinstein could have been sentenced up to 37 months in prison under federal sentencing guidelines, but U.S. District Judge Ruben Castillo took Weinstein’s age and an unspecified psychiatric condition into account in imposing his sentence. [What condition? Kleptomania? Isn’t that like giving a murderer a light sentence because he suffers from homicidal rage? Why don’t we get to know what the psychiatric condition is? Doesn’t it seem to you it’d be pretty easy for a doctor to get another doctor to make up a psychiatric condition for him? …And age? 64’s too old to risk putting him in jail for three years??]
… [Weinstein] withdrew $6 million from the Northshore Supporting Organization, a group established to raise money for the Finch College of Health Sciences-Chicago Medical School, now known as Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science.
The school is based in North Chicago in Lake County.
[He was] able to withdraw the money in the form of loans because [he was a trustee of both] the supporting organization [and the school].
Yes, the patented Madoff/Merkin approach to university trusteeship. Get in there, get trusted, steal.
Did the university know about his psychiatric condition when it made him a trustee?
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Oh. Okay. Here it says depression. He’s depressed! Who isn’t? What is it, twenty million Americans suffer from clinical depression? Psychiatrists are writing a new diagnostic manual, the DSM-V (and squabbling like babies over it, of course — psychiatrists are hopeless) — as soon as it’s released, it’ll turn out forty million Americans suffer from clinical depression. And because this guy has it too, and because he’s effing 64 years old, he gets to go to jail for 18 months for having stolen six million dollars … from a charity!
July 9th, 2009 at 10:57AM
I’m not a psychiatrist, but maybe he’s depressed because he has to go to prison. I’d be depressed if I had to go to prison.
It is true that doctors can come up with illnesses that are impossible to prove or disprove. The story is that Unum insurance nearly went bankrupt because they had written so many disability insurance policies for doctors. It was alright in the beginning, but then practicing medicine began to be less enjoyable about 20 years ago and doctors started heading for the exits. If they had a disability policy, they went on disability. This was bad news for Unum.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:38PM
It has been a few years since I did federal criminal cases but I think some of UD’s comments are misplaced. The guidelines are computed based on a number of factors concerning the offense (the more money stolen, the more drugs sold, the higher the number) and a defendant’s criminal record. There is actually a chart printed in the sentencing guidelines that’s an x y chart. To arrive at the sentence, you go up the vertical axis until you reach the number for the offense, then across the horizontal axis for the defendant’s criminal history. You come to a pair of numbers inside a parenthesis, like this (18-37). Those are months and if a judge sentences within those figures (and everyone agrees with the computation) there is no practical appeal by either the defendant or the prosecutor. In the federal court I practiced in, if a defendant was older and had no record, it was likley the judge would impose the lower of the guideline range. I suspect, but do not know, of course, that that is what happened here.
July 9th, 2009 at 5:31PM
Thanks for those details, Van. I certainly don’t know about sentencing guidelines, though the articles about this case seemed to suggest that the judge was indeed free to give him the maximum.
July 9th, 2009 at 8:58PM
Well, that’s true, but… If the judge did give him the maximum under the statute, that would be above the guidelines range and would allow an appeal which might be successful. Within the guideline range the judge could give him the max (37 months) but… again my experiance is that most judges are reluctant to do so with an elderly defendant with no record.