The trial of Wesley Snipes was a high-profile tax protester case.
Here’s a good summary of what happened:
As it happened, the jury sort of split the difference, finding Snipes guilty on three of the misdemeanor counts and absolving him of responsibility for the felonies. At the same time, they found the actor’s two co-defendants, Eddie Ray Kahn and Douglas Rosile — both of whom are connected to American Rights Litigators, a Florida-based tax protesters’ outfit — guilty of felony counts similar to the ones lodged against Snipes.
Both Snipes and the chief prosecutor, Robert O’Neill, professed to be delighted with the verdict. Using all his thespic skills to cover up his grief over the verdicts against his tax advisers, both of whom could be looking at as much as ten years in prison, Snipes told reporters that “”it does feel good, it feels great.” Meanwhile, his lawyer, Robert Bernhof, continued to maintain that his client had never meant to do anything wrong, but had simply been confused over whether he was legally obligated to pay taxes, had asked the I.R.S. about it, and would have sent them a check immediately if they’d just gotten back to him. O’Neill responded to the verdict with a statement saying that “Filing tax returns is not optional. It is a legal requirement;” now that we’ve all got that straight, Bernhof says that Snipes is “ready to pay and file.” Now the lawyers will set about determining just how much Snipes owes the government; in a worst-case scenario, he could still be sentenced to as much as three years in jail. In the meantime, I intend to start working on an Internet-urban myth calling attention to the fact that, with Snipes’s I.R.S. troubles, Woody Harrelson’s pot bust, Jennifer Lopez’s felony gun charge in the and Robert Blake’s arrest for murder, there’s some kind of curse working its way through the cast of Money Train. Chris Cooper, watch your back!
This case illustrates at least two points that I made in my prior article about the tax protester movement:
1. No one has ever been able to cite a case where they won a legal ruling on the merits from a court. (A jury verdict is a factual determination that is not a precedent for the next case.) Here, either the court denied a motion to dismiss or his attorney chose not to make such a motion.
2. What principle did Snipes vindicate here for all his trouble? His lawyer actually repudiated his position at trial.
1:29 pm on February 10, 2008
