I have mixed feelings on this issue. On the one hand, I have a strong dislike of crypto bro's, insufferable effective altruism tech bro's, and financial scammers. And SBF is like the perfect...
I have mixed feelings on this issue. On the one hand, I have a strong dislike of crypto bro's, insufferable effective altruism tech bro's, and financial scammers. And SBF is like the perfect intersection of the worst elements of tech, finance, and smug and hypocritical social business. He doesn't seem to be remorseful, and he has done a lot of harm.
Still, I have to stick to my belief that prison shouldn't be punitive. It should serve to deter and rehabilitate. There are very pragmatic reasons to hand down a sentence that sends a message to others not to play fast and loose with customer funds. And good reason to have a long enough sentence to allow SBF to grow and understand the harm he has caused.
But 110 years is grotesque. And 50-60 is still effectively a life sentence to someone in their 30's. That isn't about rehabilitation, and it is more than necessary to send a message to other CEO's.
What I'd like to see is a range with parole eligibility starting at about 15 years. So minimum, out in his 40's if he can demonstrate growth to the committee. Maybe 25 on the upper end. That would be out in his 40's if he turns around, or out at about 60 if he served the full term.
I can already hear the replies talking about the billions lost, etc. But all of that is already gone. The harm is done. Punitive suffering won't bring it back, it's a "sunk cost." So I'd rather think about what steps best serve society, rather than what most punishes the perpetrator.
I have to wonder if Bankman-Fried is actually a sociopath, or at least is severely deficient in affective empathy and lacking a moral framework compatible with laws and ethical boundaries. There's...
I have to wonder if Bankman-Fried is actually a sociopath, or at least is severely deficient in affective empathy and lacking a moral framework compatible with laws and ethical boundaries. There's an interesting exploration of the likelihood here, from Spencer Greenberg, who's very well acquainted with SBF and his history.
If, in fact, Bankman-Fried is so devoid of empathy that he can't even conceptualize the risks he took as harm to his future self, it's arguable that he is a genuine sociopath, and a dangerous one at that. It's well-established that he's an expert manipulator of those around him, an unrepentant liar who piles falsehood upon falsehood, and more than casual about harming others to chase his own ends.
Prisons are not currently places of rehabilitation and therapy. It's more likely SBF will learn additional harmful behaviors, beliefs, and techniques from the criminals around him. He may be incapable of reform and not a candidate for safe release.
Also, I'd prefer not to see him receive special treatment via the privileges afforded through his family connections and wealth, as a matter of justice.
I sympathize with all of that. SBF is so arrogant or otherwise disconnected from real people, that I think he truly thinks he's the good guy in the situation. I don't know if there is good...
I sympathize with all of that. SBF is so arrogant or otherwise disconnected from real people, that I think he truly thinks he's the good guy in the situation. I don't know if there is good rehabilitation for him, and if there is I suspect it will take time, and I don't want him to get special treatment on the way. To your point, prisons aren't a good place for it, but sometimes all you need is the catalyst of hitting rock bottom. He will have time to reflect and reevaluate if nothing else.
I don't know that I'm as worried about him learning more harmful behaviors. I think that is more of a concern with first time offenders with drug crimes, violence, etc. I don't think prison is considered "finishing school" for white collar crime. Though it might make him a worse person, I don't think it will make him more financially dangerous.
I appreciate your compassion, and generally I'd agree with your approach. But I'm more than a little irate about SBF's defense claims, particularly the claim of neurodivergence. In my experience,...
I appreciate your compassion, and generally I'd agree with your approach. But I'm more than a little irate about SBF's defense claims, particularly the claim of neurodivergence.
In my experience, neurodivergent people have enough to deal with without having to prove they're not sociopaths by association. [Yes, people with autism spectrum disorders may have deficiencies in cognitive empathy, e.g. recognizing human facial expressions and responding appropriately, but they generally have normal or even excessive affective empathy. I think of my dad, who may have been the softest-hearted person you could ever hope to meet, even if social gestures like saying "hello!" weren't always in his vocabulary.]
I think I agree with you. Once he is already facing 110 years in prison, what incentive does he have to not lie in court? What is the functional difference between 110 years and 130 years or more?...
I think I agree with you.
Once he is already facing 110 years in prison, what incentive does he have to not lie in court? What is the functional difference between 110 years and 130 years or more?
I also cynically feel like he is having the book thrown at him because crypto is not traditional banking. His crimes do not seem unusually big compared to white collar banking crimes. But his sentence does seem unusually big. I would love to see some charges like this thrown at more traditional white collar criminals.
He's facing less time than Bernie Madoff, although the cost of his fraud is ultimately less as well. I don't know that jail time will prevent people like this from striking again. Billy McFarland...
I also cynically feel like he is having the book thrown at him because crypto is not traditional banking. His crimes do not seem unusually big compared to white collar banking crimes
He's facing less time than Bernie Madoff, although the cost of his fraud is ultimately less as well. I don't know that jail time will prevent people like this from striking again. Billy McFarland only got a few years for his Fyre Festival scam and obviously didn't learn from it because he's literally doing the same damn thing again.
It does feel like that a little bit. A 50 year sentence would be on par I think with Bernie Madoff, who perpetuated a somewhat similar order of magnitude of crime but over decades of willful...
It does feel like that a little bit. A 50 year sentence would be on par I think with Bernie Madoff, who perpetuated a somewhat similar order of magnitude of crime but over decades of willful deception. He definitely did major harm, but I don't think it's the irredeemable life sentence variety.
I largely agree except that I don’t think it’s right to throw effective altruism in there. It seems like SBF took advantage of well-meaning folks in that community and their reputation ended up a...
I largely agree except that I don’t think it’s right to throw effective altruism in there. It seems like SBF took advantage of well-meaning folks in that community and their reputation ended up a victim of his scamming. For cryptocurrency, there are plenty of other examples of fraud, but I haven’t heard of any with effective altruism.
I'm not trying to throw the movement under the bus, though I do think it is just a marketing term on top of concepts that have existed in business for a while, such as meeting stakeholder needs...
I'm not trying to throw the movement under the bus, though I do think it is just a marketing term on top of concepts that have existed in business for a while, such as meeting stakeholder needs not just shareholder.
But I find SBF to be a hypocritical example of any social movement given his lavish lifestyle and hubris.
I don’t know what you’ve been reading, but that still seems like a pretty distorted idea of what it’s about. Effective altruism isn’t a business fad, it’s about charities and making donations....
I don’t know what you’ve been reading, but that still seems like a pretty distorted idea of what it’s about. Effective altruism isn’t a business fad, it’s about charities and making donations. (Along with some odd philosophical ideas, some originally from actual philosophers.)
What I described also isn't a business fad, and is about aligning the impact of business with the interests of society. That can be donating a percent of profit to relevant social causes,...
What I described also isn't a business fad, and is about aligning the impact of business with the interests of society. That can be donating a percent of profit to relevant social causes, emphasizing safe sourcing, etc. I think EF is a bit of a wrapper on many of these individual trends from the last 20 years or so.
The way I think of effective altruism (this is old-school, how GiveWell started) is that you have a pot of money you want to give away (from any source, that’s out of scope) and you want to figure...
The way I think of effective altruism (this is old-school, how GiveWell started) is that you have a pot of money you want to give away (from any source, that’s out of scope) and you want to figure out the best charities to donate to in some rigorous way, where the charity could be anywhere in the world - you don’t have a fixed idea in advance of what you want to do.
There’s an analogy to an investor who wants to figure out which investment will make the most money, except that effective altruism isn’t about making money at all. You need some other metrics. A simple but crude metric is lives saved.
These charities aren’t organizations that you have a relationship with, or at least not to start with. It’s an impersonal choice. This seems like the opposite of “stakeholder” thinking, which as I understand it is based on relationships. The idea is that an organization is part of a society and has important relationships to a lot of other groups, and you care about the other people and organizations that you have a relationship with.
Meanwhile, some people in the effective altruism community are concerned with the question “how much should I donate to charity?” They have guidelines for that. Giving away 10% of your income is often recommended, put there’s no rigor behind that, it’s just a guideline, a round number that’s also what some religions do. (The reason it came up is because philosophers have made arguments that it’s unethical not to give most of your money to charity, and this seems like too much to ask of others, even for generous people who care a lot about altruism.)
I can see that it’s superficially similar to a business giving a percentage of profits to social causes. But giving a percentage of your income to charity is an independent idea and it’s not specific to effective altruism. It’s just altruism. Wanting to think rigorously and impersonally about who to give money to is the part that makes it “effective altruism.”
(We could have a different discussion about how these good intentions go astray. I just wanted to clarify which idea is at the heart of it.)
I think there's a few things causing confusion, not the least of which is SBF being, in general, a terrible hypocrite. Effective altruism, as you say, is a broad philosophy. What SBF did was...
I think there's a few things causing confusion, not the least of which is SBF being, in general, a terrible hypocrite. Effective altruism, as you say, is a broad philosophy. What SBF did was entangle that concept with justifications for how he operated his business. E.g., get rich at any cost because then I can make the world better.
But the business world already has a framework to think about society as a stakeholder, and methods to do good, both in general and in ways that are thematically in line with the business. Some small to midsize business do a really good job of creating net good that is sustained through the successful operation of their business as a proportion of their revenue.
So in the case of SBF, he brought in this term, effective altruism, into the business realm, and ignored all the prior work that has been done to try and get sustainable good out of the successful operation of business. And he justified his actions and lifestyle in that realm, implicitly and otherwise, by constantly talking about all the good he was going to do with the money.
Of course that was all a sham, and he lived large at the expense of his customers. Notably, the chapter 11 folks weren't clawing hundreds of millions back from Greenpeace.
So I don't think that effective altruism is a sham, I just don't think it is new, conceptually, to the business realm. Just look at S-Corps. And my criticism of SBF is that he was this hypocritical nexus of philanthropy, tech, and finance.
It's arguable that the Center for Effective Altruism's leadership had good reason to disassociate the organization from Bankman-Fried, but continued taking his donations anyway. While that doesn't...
It's arguable that the Center for Effective Altruism's leadership had good reason to disassociate the organization from Bankman-Fried, but continued taking his donations anyway. While that doesn't discredit EA as a philosophy and basis for action, there are other informed criticisms that I won't go into because they can be easily found and I don't want to derail the thread.
I agree. It's interesting how people (general observations from online) usually in favour of some form of restorative-type justice will change their tune if it's a figure they dislike enough. And...
But 110 years is grotesque. And 50-60 is still effectively a life sentence to someone in their 30's. That isn't about rehabilitation, and it is more than necessary to send a message to other CEO's.
The harm is done. Punitive suffering won't bring it back, it's a "sunk cost." So I'd rather think about what steps best serve society, rather than what most punishes the perpetrator.
I agree. It's interesting how people (general observations from online) usually in favour of some form of restorative-type justice will change their tune if it's a figure they dislike enough. And I'm someone who very much dislikes SBF and think he deserves to spend a decent portion of the rest of his life in jail. In my amateur opinion even thirty years seems like more than enough to deter would-be future copycats.
That is what made me stop and rethink things. I dislike him so much that I wanted to reevaluate my knee jerk of "throw the book at him." Have a great day!
That is what made me stop and rethink things. I dislike him so much that I wanted to reevaluate my knee jerk of "throw the book at him."
Massive white-collar crime seems to break our court systems when it comes to sentencing. One of the leading arguments for Trump to commute Sholam Weiss' sentence was that he was sentenced to an...
Massive white-collar crime seems to break our court systems when it comes to sentencing. One of the leading arguments for Trump to commute Sholam Weiss' sentence was that he was sentenced to an 845-year sentence for a fraud that was less than 10% of the scale of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. Once the scale of fraud is over $10 million and the sentence is over 20 years, it seems that the sentencing is more about what the prosecutors can get away with to prove they're tough on crime and no longer a correlation to the size of the harm done. Perhaps there should be some honesty in the system and admit when fraud is large enough to peg the meter—just call it a life sentence if it is over $20 mil or something instead of quibbling over whether 110 years or 120 years is a better fit.
As an aside, when looking up the longest prison sentences and scrolling past all the consecutive life sentences, I had two observations:
It's not just a US quirk for white-collar crime to receive arbitrarily large numbers in the sentence. Thailand & Spain both have multiple entries for fraudsters who received sentences well above 20,000 years that were released once they hit the statutory maximum for nonviolent crime.
Rapists from Oklahoma appear to be disproportionately represented in the list. Makes me curious if rape is ineligible for a life sentence under Oklahoma law but otherwise has no maximum punishment.
There’s no scale that works. It might seem reasonable that stealing ten million dollars is a thousand times worse than stealing a ten thousand dollars, but other than with fines, there’s no...
There’s no scale that works. It might seem reasonable that stealing ten million dollars is a thousand times worse than stealing a ten thousand dollars, but other than with fines, there’s no reasonable way to make the punishment a thousand times worse.
More generally, if each occurrence of a crime has a certain prison term and someone does it a hundred times (easier to do with white collar crime) adding things up is going to result in silly numbers.
So it seems like the problem isn’t just with prosecutors, it’s with addition? Maybe the people who write the laws aren’t thinking about the math?
I suppose they could use a log scale, but that doesn’t seem particularly satisfying either.
I have no idea, but just to spitball, could this perhaps be a case where these kind of crimes tend to have a multiplier due to the fact that there's so many more "victims" than violent crimes?
I have no idea, but just to spitball, could this perhaps be a case where these kind of crimes tend to have a multiplier due to the fact that there's so many more "victims" than violent crimes?
Yeah, it's odd to see the consequence of applying a law that was written to criminalize one type of act, when it is applied dozens or hundreds of times. I do agree that our courts would benefit...
Yeah, it's odd to see the consequence of applying a law that was written to criminalize one type of act, when it is applied dozens or hundreds of times. I do agree that our courts would benefit from some broad guidelines for situations where a "minor" crime is applied en masse.
That is interesting about Oklahoma, I might have to look into their sentencing guidelines.
I don't think the sentencing is based exclusively on the scale of loss due to fraud, but rather on the number of the perpetrator's knowing, intentional acts and the length of time the fraud...
I don't think the sentencing is based exclusively on the scale of loss due to fraud, but rather on the number of the perpetrator's knowing, intentional acts and the length of time the fraud persisted. By this standard, Bernie Madoff's sentence was wholly justified. Weiss made the dire mistake of fleeing justice, and what might have been a 5-year sentence under a plea bargain was punitively escalated.
From the article: The letter is here. This might be seen as John Ray bragging about his team's work, but I think it's interesting (for a finance/legal geek version of "interesting," anyway) to get...
From the article:
The CEO of FTX Trading, John Ray, sent a letter to Judge Lewis Kaplan Wednesday to correct what he called "callously" and "demonstrably false" claims that disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried made in hopes of receiving a lighter sentence for crimes including defrauding FTX customers.
In a sentencing memo, Bankman-Fried asked the court to drastically slash his prison sentence from what he considered a "grotesque" 110-year maximum to five to six years.
The letter is here. This might be seen as John Ray bragging about his team's work, but I think it's interesting (for a finance/legal geek version of "interesting," anyway) to get a glimpse of how much is involved in unwinding the FTX disaster, and how much remains to be done.
[...] even the best conceivable outcome in the Chapter 11 proceeding will not yield a true, full economic recovery by all creditors and non-insider equity investors as if the fraud never happened. As to creditors, the Bankruptcy Code provides that each creditor's claim must be valued as of the Petition Date. In other words, a victim who had bitcoin on the FTX exchange on November 11, 2022 will receive, as the Bankruptcy Court has determined, a distribution based on the value of the claim on that date, which is approximately 400% lower than the value today. Because the value of certain cryptocurrencies has risen sharply since the petition was filed, many of Mr. Bankman-Fried's victims are extremely unhappy with the "petition date value" provided for under the law.
...
The statements about payments of claims of customers and creditors in full is always caveated by the word "allowed" [...]. The expectation is that allowed claims will be paid in full if all of the hard work described above pays off [...]. The question remains, though, how one takes a filed claim and turns it into an allowed claim. One must first start at the total dollar amount of claims filed. That number is $23.6 quintillion dollars.
Sounds like they have a lot of junk claims to filter out.
He actually seems like quite a bad manipulator, considering how quickly all this stuff came to light. Apparently somebody leaked a brainstorming document he wrote, where he considered going...
He actually seems like quite a bad manipulator, considering how quickly all this stuff came to light. Apparently somebody leaked a brainstorming document he wrote, where he considered going alt-right and blaming his criminal charges on the illuminati. He's as shameless a liar as they come, they should put him in that prison Bane used on Batman.
I have mixed feelings on this issue. On the one hand, I have a strong dislike of crypto bro's, insufferable effective altruism tech bro's, and financial scammers. And SBF is like the perfect intersection of the worst elements of tech, finance, and smug and hypocritical social business. He doesn't seem to be remorseful, and he has done a lot of harm.
Still, I have to stick to my belief that prison shouldn't be punitive. It should serve to deter and rehabilitate. There are very pragmatic reasons to hand down a sentence that sends a message to others not to play fast and loose with customer funds. And good reason to have a long enough sentence to allow SBF to grow and understand the harm he has caused.
But 110 years is grotesque. And 50-60 is still effectively a life sentence to someone in their 30's. That isn't about rehabilitation, and it is more than necessary to send a message to other CEO's.
What I'd like to see is a range with parole eligibility starting at about 15 years. So minimum, out in his 40's if he can demonstrate growth to the committee. Maybe 25 on the upper end. That would be out in his 40's if he turns around, or out at about 60 if he served the full term.
I can already hear the replies talking about the billions lost, etc. But all of that is already gone. The harm is done. Punitive suffering won't bring it back, it's a "sunk cost." So I'd rather think about what steps best serve society, rather than what most punishes the perpetrator.
I have to wonder if Bankman-Fried is actually a sociopath, or at least is severely deficient in affective empathy and lacking a moral framework compatible with laws and ethical boundaries. There's an interesting exploration of the likelihood here, from Spencer Greenberg, who's very well acquainted with SBF and his history.
If, in fact, Bankman-Fried is so devoid of empathy that he can't even conceptualize the risks he took as harm to his future self, it's arguable that he is a genuine sociopath, and a dangerous one at that. It's well-established that he's an expert manipulator of those around him, an unrepentant liar who piles falsehood upon falsehood, and more than casual about harming others to chase his own ends.
Prisons are not currently places of rehabilitation and therapy. It's more likely SBF will learn additional harmful behaviors, beliefs, and techniques from the criminals around him. He may be incapable of reform and not a candidate for safe release.
Also, I'd prefer not to see him receive special treatment via the privileges afforded through his family connections and wealth, as a matter of justice.
I sympathize with all of that. SBF is so arrogant or otherwise disconnected from real people, that I think he truly thinks he's the good guy in the situation. I don't know if there is good rehabilitation for him, and if there is I suspect it will take time, and I don't want him to get special treatment on the way. To your point, prisons aren't a good place for it, but sometimes all you need is the catalyst of hitting rock bottom. He will have time to reflect and reevaluate if nothing else.
I don't know that I'm as worried about him learning more harmful behaviors. I think that is more of a concern with first time offenders with drug crimes, violence, etc. I don't think prison is considered "finishing school" for white collar crime. Though it might make him a worse person, I don't think it will make him more financially dangerous.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
I appreciate your compassion, and generally I'd agree with your approach. But I'm more than a little irate about SBF's defense claims, particularly the claim of neurodivergence.
In my experience, neurodivergent people have enough to deal with without having to prove they're not sociopaths by association. [Yes, people with autism spectrum disorders may have deficiencies in cognitive empathy, e.g. recognizing human facial expressions and responding appropriately, but they generally have normal or even excessive affective empathy. I think of my dad, who may have been the softest-hearted person you could ever hope to meet, even if social gestures like saying "hello!" weren't always in his vocabulary.]
I think I agree with you.
Once he is already facing 110 years in prison, what incentive does he have to not lie in court? What is the functional difference between 110 years and 130 years or more?
I also cynically feel like he is having the book thrown at him because crypto is not traditional banking. His crimes do not seem unusually big compared to white collar banking crimes. But his sentence does seem unusually big. I would love to see some charges like this thrown at more traditional white collar criminals.
He's facing less time than Bernie Madoff, although the cost of his fraud is ultimately less as well. I don't know that jail time will prevent people like this from striking again. Billy McFarland only got a few years for his Fyre Festival scam and obviously didn't learn from it because he's literally doing the same damn thing again.
I don't disagree with anything that's been said, but just for comparison, Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison.
It does feel like that a little bit. A 50 year sentence would be on par I think with Bernie Madoff, who perpetuated a somewhat similar order of magnitude of crime but over decades of willful deception. He definitely did major harm, but I don't think it's the irredeemable life sentence variety.
I largely agree except that I don’t think it’s right to throw effective altruism in there. It seems like SBF took advantage of well-meaning folks in that community and their reputation ended up a victim of his scamming. For cryptocurrency, there are plenty of other examples of fraud, but I haven’t heard of any with effective altruism.
I'm not trying to throw the movement under the bus, though I do think it is just a marketing term on top of concepts that have existed in business for a while, such as meeting stakeholder needs not just shareholder.
But I find SBF to be a hypocritical example of any social movement given his lavish lifestyle and hubris.
I don’t know what you’ve been reading, but that still seems like a pretty distorted idea of what it’s about. Effective altruism isn’t a business fad, it’s about charities and making donations. (Along with some odd philosophical ideas, some originally from actual philosophers.)
What I described also isn't a business fad, and is about aligning the impact of business with the interests of society. That can be donating a percent of profit to relevant social causes, emphasizing safe sourcing, etc. I think EF is a bit of a wrapper on many of these individual trends from the last 20 years or so.
The way I think of effective altruism (this is old-school, how GiveWell started) is that you have a pot of money you want to give away (from any source, that’s out of scope) and you want to figure out the best charities to donate to in some rigorous way, where the charity could be anywhere in the world - you don’t have a fixed idea in advance of what you want to do.
There’s an analogy to an investor who wants to figure out which investment will make the most money, except that effective altruism isn’t about making money at all. You need some other metrics. A simple but crude metric is lives saved.
These charities aren’t organizations that you have a relationship with, or at least not to start with. It’s an impersonal choice. This seems like the opposite of “stakeholder” thinking, which as I understand it is based on relationships. The idea is that an organization is part of a society and has important relationships to a lot of other groups, and you care about the other people and organizations that you have a relationship with.
Meanwhile, some people in the effective altruism community are concerned with the question “how much should I donate to charity?” They have guidelines for that. Giving away 10% of your income is often recommended, put there’s no rigor behind that, it’s just a guideline, a round number that’s also what some religions do. (The reason it came up is because philosophers have made arguments that it’s unethical not to give most of your money to charity, and this seems like too much to ask of others, even for generous people who care a lot about altruism.)
I can see that it’s superficially similar to a business giving a percentage of profits to social causes. But giving a percentage of your income to charity is an independent idea and it’s not specific to effective altruism. It’s just altruism. Wanting to think rigorously and impersonally about who to give money to is the part that makes it “effective altruism.”
(We could have a different discussion about how these good intentions go astray. I just wanted to clarify which idea is at the heart of it.)
I think there's a few things causing confusion, not the least of which is SBF being, in general, a terrible hypocrite. Effective altruism, as you say, is a broad philosophy. What SBF did was entangle that concept with justifications for how he operated his business. E.g., get rich at any cost because then I can make the world better.
But the business world already has a framework to think about society as a stakeholder, and methods to do good, both in general and in ways that are thematically in line with the business. Some small to midsize business do a really good job of creating net good that is sustained through the successful operation of their business as a proportion of their revenue.
So in the case of SBF, he brought in this term, effective altruism, into the business realm, and ignored all the prior work that has been done to try and get sustainable good out of the successful operation of business. And he justified his actions and lifestyle in that realm, implicitly and otherwise, by constantly talking about all the good he was going to do with the money.
Of course that was all a sham, and he lived large at the expense of his customers. Notably, the chapter 11 folks weren't clawing hundreds of millions back from Greenpeace.
So I don't think that effective altruism is a sham, I just don't think it is new, conceptually, to the business realm. Just look at S-Corps. And my criticism of SBF is that he was this hypocritical nexus of philanthropy, tech, and finance.
Thanks for the discussion, have a great day!
It's arguable that the Center for Effective Altruism's leadership had good reason to disassociate the organization from Bankman-Fried, but continued taking his donations anyway. While that doesn't discredit EA as a philosophy and basis for action, there are other informed criticisms that I won't go into because they can be easily found and I don't want to derail the thread.
I agree. It's interesting how people (general observations from online) usually in favour of some form of restorative-type justice will change their tune if it's a figure they dislike enough. And I'm someone who very much dislikes SBF and think he deserves to spend a decent portion of the rest of his life in jail. In my amateur opinion even thirty years seems like more than enough to deter would-be future copycats.
That is what made me stop and rethink things. I dislike him so much that I wanted to reevaluate my knee jerk of "throw the book at him."
Have a great day!
Massive white-collar crime seems to break our court systems when it comes to sentencing. One of the leading arguments for Trump to commute Sholam Weiss' sentence was that he was sentenced to an 845-year sentence for a fraud that was less than 10% of the scale of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. Once the scale of fraud is over $10 million and the sentence is over 20 years, it seems that the sentencing is more about what the prosecutors can get away with to prove they're tough on crime and no longer a correlation to the size of the harm done. Perhaps there should be some honesty in the system and admit when fraud is large enough to peg the meter—just call it a life sentence if it is over $20 mil or something instead of quibbling over whether 110 years or 120 years is a better fit.
As an aside, when looking up the longest prison sentences and scrolling past all the consecutive life sentences, I had two observations:
There’s no scale that works. It might seem reasonable that stealing ten million dollars is a thousand times worse than stealing a ten thousand dollars, but other than with fines, there’s no reasonable way to make the punishment a thousand times worse.
More generally, if each occurrence of a crime has a certain prison term and someone does it a hundred times (easier to do with white collar crime) adding things up is going to result in silly numbers.
So it seems like the problem isn’t just with prosecutors, it’s with addition? Maybe the people who write the laws aren’t thinking about the math?
I suppose they could use a log scale, but that doesn’t seem particularly satisfying either.
I have no idea, but just to spitball, could this perhaps be a case where these kind of crimes tend to have a multiplier due to the fact that there's so many more "victims" than violent crimes?
Yeah, it's odd to see the consequence of applying a law that was written to criminalize one type of act, when it is applied dozens or hundreds of times. I do agree that our courts would benefit from some broad guidelines for situations where a "minor" crime is applied en masse.
That is interesting about Oklahoma, I might have to look into their sentencing guidelines.
Have a great day!
I don't think the sentencing is based exclusively on the scale of loss due to fraud, but rather on the number of the perpetrator's knowing, intentional acts and the length of time the fraud persisted. By this standard, Bernie Madoff's sentence was wholly justified. Weiss made the dire mistake of fleeing justice, and what might have been a 5-year sentence under a plea bargain was punitively escalated.
From the article:
The letter is here. This might be seen as John Ray bragging about his team's work, but I think it's interesting (for a finance/legal geek version of "interesting," anyway) to get a glimpse of how much is involved in unwinding the FTX disaster, and how much remains to be done.
...
Sounds like they have a lot of junk claims to filter out.
He actually seems like quite a bad manipulator, considering how quickly all this stuff came to light. Apparently somebody leaked a brainstorming document he wrote, where he considered going alt-right and blaming his criminal charges on the illuminati. He's as shameless a liar as they come, they should put him in that prison Bane used on Batman.