Now’s the time to start hoarding your special edition Passenger 57 DVDs, because you might not see Wesley Snipes again until 2011.
Now that he’s officially a convicted tax-dodger, Wesley Snipes is waiting to be told his fate, and prosecutors are urging the judge to hit him with the maximum three-year jail sentence, with a $5 million fine thrown in on top.
It sounds particularly harsh, but prosecutors want Wesley Snipes to serve the maximum punishment so it will deter any Wesley Snipes fans who think that not filing your tax returns is cool. Although we’re sure none of them think that – if Wesley Snipes has any fans at all, we’re not even sure they’d be able to spell their own names, let alone file any tax returns.
Celebrities, take this as a warning. If you ever want to get loaded up on drugs and drive your car into incoming motorway traffic, or threaten to kill a man while waving a gun in his face, that’s fine. At best you’ll serve a couple of days in prison. But don’t you dare think about not paying your taxes, or you’ll be thrown away for a three-stretch.
Just look at Wesley Snipes. His issues with taxes have been well-known ever since his 2006 arrest, but now he’s actually a convicted criminal because of it. You see, Wesley Snipes doesn’t believe that the IRS is a properly established government agency, and that he shouldn’t pay taxes because he was a ‘stateless person’.
And thanks to these beliefs, Wesley Snipes didn’t file a tax return in 1999, 2000 or 2001. To be fair, neither would we if it meant telling anyone that we earnt money from a movie called Liberty Stands Still.
Although Wesley Snipes was acquitted of the more serious charges of felony tax fraud and conspiracy – meaning that he escaped a possible 16-year sentence – he was still convicted on three misdemeanour charges of not filing tax returns.
The maximum penalty for that is three years in jail, so you’ll never guess what punishment the prosecutors are pushing the judge to give him. ABC reports:
In a sentencing memorandum filed at a federal court in Florida — on the April 15 tax return filing deadline — the U.S. Justice Department asked a federal judge to sentence the “Blade” actor to three years in prison and pay $5 million in fines. “The sentence for the criminal tax scofflaw must be commensurate with the gravity of the offense, and should act as a deterrent to other potential violators,” federal prosecutors wrote.
That’s all well and good – having seen the movies Demolition Man, Boiling Point and Drop Zone it seems clear that Wesley Snipes can handle himself in jail – but what about us, the Wesley Snipes fans who want nothing more than to see a Blade 4 released sometime before old age turns us blind?
Maybe there’s a workaround here – Wesley Snipes’ screentime in Blade was 43 minutes, his screentime in Blade II was 40 minutes and his screentime in Blade Trinity was 39 minutes. That means that at this rate, Wesley Snipes’ screentime in Blade 4 will be reduced to a three-second scene of him driving past the other actors in a car while whooping to himself. We’re sure that a day-release can be arranged for that sort of thing.
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