Skip to main content

Shkrelli: What's his status nowadays

Martin Shkreli 2016.jpg

I  recently read an article about the cancellation of a planned appearance at UC Davis of alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and Martin Shkreli.  Seems like a classic instance of "heckler's veto."

 I don't care about MY especially. The references to MS in this story piqued my interest, though.

You may remember that Shkreli, pictured above, was formerly a pharmaceutical CEO, accused of jacking up prices of life-saving drugs unconscionably and of committing securities fraud in the process. He was arrested by the FBI a little more than a year ago, December 2015.

It struck me when I heard about this UC Davis thing that it has been a long time since I had heard anything more about the proceedings. I gather he has been out on bail pending trial ever since. But this seems like a fairly long time to pass without any news.

There once was a time, not long ago, when I would have been following the case in detail, and I'd know about discovery motions, evidentiary exclusion issues and other pretrial stuff. But the focus of my own professional (and personal) concerns has shifted and I have no idea. I didn't even know until I started work on this blog post the district in which he had been indicted.

By way of penance (?), I've looked into it.  He was indicted in the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn. In recent days the judge in charge of the matter approved a motion allowing the defendant to travel to Washington DC for inaugural festivities. That seems oddly permissive to me for someone who had to post a $5 million bond to remain at large at all.

There is a trial date: June 26.

That's enough to satisfy my curiosity for now. I'll come back to it to look at discovery issues some other time.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable a...