From 8 to 10 December 2008, the jury heard closing arguments in the KPMG tax shelter case. Raymond Ruble's lawyer Jack S. Hoffinger told jurors that it was impossible to conclude that the defendants purposefully tried to break the law in helping at least 600 wealthy people trim their taxes since they did not try to hide what they were doing from the Internal Revenue Service or others. "What do we have, a massive suicide pact?" he asked. He said that the defendants would not have designed something criminal and then "put it out there so that the IRS will see it, the government will see it and we will end up in court charged with a crime." Assistant U.S. Attorney Margaret Garnett retorted that the defendants created tax shelters that were actually shams meant to appear to be legitimate investments: "These defendants sold these so-called investments for years and years and not a single one of these defendants' clients ever made a dime of profit." She said that the only purpose of the fraudulent tax shelters marketed from 1997 until 2000 was to "generate artificial tax losses to evade millions and millions of taxes." She speculated that the defendants may have had a false sense of safety from the law, and claimed that "their greed and ambition overcame their sense of right and wrong."