Wesley Snipes Sentenced to Three Years

Snipes, famous for his tax protest stance and “Blade” franchise, paying the price

The Beatles said “Tax man don’t take it all” and the IRS wanted $18.5 million for back taxes from action star and tax protester Wesley Snipes. After a trial over these affairs, they are now taking three years of freedom and trying to send him to prison, pending his expected appeal.

On Thursday, he was sentenced to the maximum three-year sentence for not filing tax returns.

But judging by the sentence, his pleas for leniency – and the thirty-odd character references from such Hollywood luminaries as Woody Harrelson and Denzel Washington (’Wesley is like a tree - a mighty oak’, the latter rather curiously suggested) – have clearly fallen on deaf ears. Snipes’ lawyers are complaining that it’s unfair for the courts to make an example of him just because he’s famous (’Mr. Snipes was sentenced because he’s Mr. Snipes,’ one said, which seems unarguable on a number of levels), but that’s obviously the plan here.

Prosecutors had requested the sentence, one year for each of Snipes’s convictions, saying the star of Blade 3 and Demolition Man had “engaged a campaign of criminal tax conduct, combining brazen defiance with insidious concealment”, telling the US District