Prosecutors said on Wednesday that Bernie Madoff should not be released early from prison even if kidney disease kills him within months, The Associated Press reports.
The prosecutors cited the scope and magnitude of his decades-long Ponzi scheme that cost thousands of investors billions of dollars.
Madoff is serving a 150-year prison sentence after being convicted in 2009 of orchestrating a Ponzi scheme that saw investors bilked out of an estimated $65 billion.
Last month his attorney wrote a letter to a US federal judge in which he petitioned for Madoff’s early release, saying Madoff suffers from "terminal kidney disease, among other serious medical conditions."
Over 500 victims had written to a Manhattan federal court judge to oppose early release for the 81-year-old Madoff, the prosecutors noted on Wednesday.
Madoff had demonstrated “a wholesale lack of understanding of the seriousness of his crimes and a lack of compassion for his victims, underscoring that he is undeserving of compassionate release himself,” they said, according to AP.
Prosecutors cited numerous letters from victims, including one from a woman who said her husband of 40 years committed suicide after learning of the fraud and another in which an 84-year-old victim said: “Why should he be shown any compassion, when he had none for his many victims?”
Madoff began his sentence months after he confessed to his family and others that the $17.5 billion entrusted to him by thousands of investors had never been invested, even though he claimed it had grown in value by tens of billions of dollars. At the time, there was only several hundred thousand dollars left.
His Ponzi scheme, estimated to have begun as early as the 1980s, destroyed or crippled the finances of many individuals and charitable organizations worldwide.
Madoff remained an advisor to a multitude of stars and well-connected members of the American-Jewish community, right up until his arrest in December 2008 and the collapse of his scheme.
A pyramid, or Ponzi, scheme is a form of fraud in which returns on investments are generated only by bringing in fresh investments from new victims. Cash from new clients is used to pay existing clients until the scheme eventually collapses.
Madoff's fraud was revealed during the financial crisis in 2008 when he was unable to satisfy growing client demands to withdraw their investments, and many lost their savings or were unable to retire.
Last year, Madoff asked President Donald Trump to commute his sentence.