> even though there technically isn’t one) is facing up to 100 years in jail for three separate indictments. The most recent two indictments—the threatening of an FBI officer in a YouTube video and the concealing of evidence—do not seem worthy of such a harsh sentence, considering a man in Houston recieved only 42 months for threatening to blow up an FBI building, and a former dentist got 18 months for threatening to kill an FBI agent.
Interesting slight of hand comparing maximum possible jail time for three separate offenses to actual sentences for one.
>Interesting slight of hand comparing maximum possible jail time for three separate offenses to actual sentences for one.
I don't think cutting a century into thirds would do much to refute the disproportionality of the sentence to the underlying action.
And the fact that the maximum and what the typical guilty party receives are so divergent is a big part of the problem. It leaves too much to the discretion of prosecutors and courts and is unacceptably coercive to the accused to have to risk anything like that sort of penalty merely in order to exercise any of the constitutional rights that effectively evaporate the moment you accept a plea bargain.
We've had this discussion before. The maximum sentence available under law is not a good guide to the maximum likely sentence. Think about the fact that murder can get the death penalty of life in prison with no parole, but the mean sentence is about 20 years and the median about 24 (from which you can infer that quite a few people get short sentences in the 6-10 year bracket).
you can't talk about the disproportionality of the sentence because none has been handed down yet. It's meaningless to talk about the disproportionality of the maximum sentence when the law is designed to accommodate offences from the trivial to the truly egregious.
You think this allows too much discretion to prosecutors and courts, OK, so did a lot of other people at one point, and that's how we wound up with standardized sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums. Typical sentence lengths went up, because the sentencing guidelines are so exhaustive that prosecutors pile on obscure enhancements. Mandatory minimums were recently found to be unconstitutional, in US v. Booker. Federal sentencing guidelines were put in place in 1984. It's not a coincidence that the US incarceration rate took off for the stratosphere around the same time. Sentencing was more lenient, albeit less consistent, when it was left to the discretion of the courts.
You don't lose any of your constitutional rights when you accept a plea bargain. The reality is that people take them because they don't expect to win in court. The standard of proof in criminal trials is very high, so defense lawyers have little incentive to accept a plea bargain unless the evidence overwhelmingly points to guilt.
You don't lose any constitutional rights when you accept a plea bargain, but you voluntarily give up many constitutional rights.
To suggest that the only reason people take plea bargains is because they don't expect to win in court is hardly reality. Many, many people take plea bargains because of the cost of a protracted legal battle, not to mention the stress.
You're right on one thing though: we have had this discussion before. But if it was a clear-cut as you implicate, there would be no reason Aaron Swartz shouldn't have accepted a plea bargain.
He should have. 6 months for a case where he was caught red-handed was a good deal. He would have been in a minimum security prison with white-collar criminals and possibly been a candidate for early release after 3-4 months. Forget about JSTOR; it's obviously against the law to secretly patch your computer into someone else's network wiring closet and repeatedly circumvent the security measures designed to keep you off the network.
Something that has bothered me about the HN debate on this is that people think that because the MIT security response was weak and easily bypassed, there was no real offense in doing so. This is equivalent to saying that that only those with fortress-like security deserve legal protection from criminal access. Numerous people have objected that because the MIT wiring closet wasn't secure enough then there can't be anything wrong about plugging into it; essentially they're arguing that 'because I could' should be a valid legal defense.
1. People are upset that Aaron Swartz faced losing the right to vote, hold public office, serve on a jury, or own a firearm, penalties entirely unrelated and disproportionate to the crime.
2. Your analogy fails because MIT IT certainly know what they could do to secure their systems more robustly, and chose not to do so. This debate has gone on long enough; most of HN disagrees with your position. Let it drop.
> People are upset that Aaron Swartz faced losing the right to vote, hold public office, serve on a jury, or own a firearm, penalties entirely unrelated and disproportionate to the crime.
The "Felony" idea comes from the maximum possible sentence for a crime. CFAA has been on the books since like 1986 so as soon as Aaron decided to run afoul of its provisions that was a done deal.
As it turns out many states have provisions to restore voting rights to felons, firearm rights, etc. But this type of case is one of the few things prosecutors don't have discretion on, except by dropping charges completely (which I understand is what you think should happen, but that's not going to match what most of the rest of the country thinks, where fairness of justice and due process are at least theoretically the ideal).
> This debate has gone on long enough; most of HN disagrees with your position.
Oh! Is HN the decider now? I browse this site and I wasn't aware my opinion had been pre-determined for me. Are there any other HN-mandated opinions I should adopt now that this question has been raised? Am I still allowed to like Microsoft products? Are iPhones mandatory or can I keep my Android?
I bet you know how you could secure your home more robustly. That has no bearing on whether someone who breaks in to steal your laptop is committing a crime.
1. I think ex-felons should be able to discharge their sentences totally, regain the right to vote, and earn back their various legal privileges. But right now, they can't, and I don't see what distinguishes Aaron Swartz from any other ex-felon.
2. You're essentially saying that the victim was asking for it. As for most of HN disagreeing, neither of us knows what the proportions are. There has been some vocal opposition to my arguments, but a lot of it comes from the same small number of people and I've also received a fair degree of support from other quarters. If you don't like it, don't read it.
>Your analogy fails because MIT IT certainly know what they could do to secure their systems more robustly, and chose not to do so.
While I am pro Aaron and anti-MIT this is argument is weak sause.
So what? I also know what I could do to secure my house more robustly (put an electric fence, more cameras, a steel door with secure locks etc), and I don't do it. Does that give you the right to enter into it against my will, much less to a robbery?
>This debate has gone on long enough; most of HN disagrees with your position. Let it drop.
And most of US citizens disagree with you (maybe), and say that abortions should remain illegal. Should you just let it drop? One should not abandon his views because of what a majority (or minority) says. And neither is what the majority agrees with always right.
>It's meaningless to talk about the disproportionality of the maximum sentence when the law is designed to accommodate offences from the trivial to the truly egregious.
It isn't designed that way for these offenses, that's the problem. Congress is trying to shove too much under a single offense and then relying on the sentencing guidelines and the courts to separate it out. It shouldn't be possible under a well-drafted law to be guilty of a felony without having done something which is sufficiently egregious to justify a felony penalty.
>You think this allows too much discretion to prosecutors and courts, OK, so did a lot of other people at one point, and that's how we wound up with standardized sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums.
Both of those things are not what I am suggesting. The trouble is that maximum sentences for nonviolent crimes are too high and the serious offenses are defined too broadly. Establishing or raising minimum sentences does nothing to help that, if anything it makes it worse.
Likewise the sentencing guidelines. The whole concept of "enhancements" is rubbish. All crimes with felony penalties should be narrow, well-defined and require intentional malice. The more broadly defined an offense is, the lower the penalties should be. Enhancements are the opposite: They take minor offenses and ratchet them up into severe crimes based on broad and not necessarily even relevant ancillary factors.
We rarely if ever see people who get into a bar fight be accused of attempted murder and have to rely on the sentencing guidelines to avoid a life sentence, because murder is narrow and well-defined, and things that are slightly similar to murder but not nearly as severe are not covered. They have their own crimes with correspondingly lower penalties. There is no reason we can't do the same thing with computer crimes, drug crimes, etc.
>You don't lose any of your constitutional rights when you accept a plea bargain.
You have a constitutional right to, among other things, a jury trial. You cannot both accept a plea bargain and exercise that right -- you can't take the plea offer contingent on the jury finding you guilty.
>The reality is that people take them because they don't expect to win in court. The standard of proof in criminal trials is very high, so defense lawyers have little incentive to accept a plea bargain unless the evidence overwhelmingly points to guilt.
It makes logical sense to accept a plea bargain in cases where its expected value is better than the expected value of a trial. The issue comes when the outcome of a trial is at all uncertain. If you think you have a 75% chance that the prosecutor will not be able to prove your guilt beyond a reasonable doubt -- or that your interpretation of the law will be adopted by the judge -- but the expected penalty if you lose is five or more times higher than the plea bargain, you are statistically better off to take the plea notwithstanding that you are likely to win in court. Reduce the delta between expected sentences at trial and plea offers and this stops being the case for the accused who have a fair chance at winning while the accused with no chance of winning will still take the plea.
It shouldn't be possible under a well-drafted law to be guilty of a felony without having done something which is sufficiently egregious to justify a felony penalty.
This is kind of tautological. You know that a felony is a crime involving a sentence of more than 1 year, right? It's not reserved for only violent crimes or hardcore criminal offenses, a great many crimes are considered to be felonies. This might seem excessive if you aren't familiar with teh criminal justice system, but it's not that long since we were willing to hang horse thieves and nobody found that idea remarkable.
The trouble is that maximum sentences for nonviolent crimes are too high and are defined too broadly.
Well, how about that CEO in Iowa who robbed $216 million from a pension fund and was sentenced yesterday to 50 years in prison; what do you think an appropriate maximum should be for financial crimes like that? What about the situation where the maximum penalty is not that high, but someone commits multiple offenses?
Likewise the sentencing guidelines. The whole concept of "enhancements" is rubbish. All crimes with felony penalties should be narrow, well-defined and require intentional malice.
Have you ever read the sentencing guidelines or looked at cases where they're argued at appeal? They are very narrowly defined and specific. Go to http://www.sentencing.us/ and look at some examples.
We rarely if ever see people who get into a bar fight being accused of attempted murder and having to rely on the sentencing guidelines to avoid a life sentence, because murder is narrow and well-defined, and things that are slightly similar to murder but not nearly as severe are distinguished and not included. They have their own crimes with correspondingly lower penalties. There is no reason we can't do the same thing with computer crimes, drug crimes, etc.
Has it occurred to you that you might not be very well informed about the law in this area? Because I have read plenty of cases being prosecuted as attempted murder that don't make the news, and likewise both drug laws and the sentencing guidelines are quite a bit more fine-grained than you seem to appreciate.
You have a constitutional right to, among other things, a jury trial. You cannot both accept a plea bargain and exercise that right -- you can't take the plea offer contingent on the jury finding you guilty.
Well, if you don't like the offer, take the trial. The right to a jury is a separate right to that of a trial. Personally I would rather do without the jury part, but that's neither here nor there. The point of a plea bargain is that if you are probably not going to win at trial because the evidence is against you, then by accepting responsibility and saving the state the cost of a trial you are offered a sentence that reflects the reduced burden on the public. It seems to me that you want to have your cake and eat it.
If you think you have a 75% chance that the prosecutor will not be able to prove your guilt beyond a reasonable doubt -- or that your interpretation of the law will be adopted by the judge -- but the expected penalty if you lose is five or more times higher than the plea bargain, you are statistically better off to take the plea notwithstanding that you are likely to win in court.
AT first blush, but when you figure in the opportunity cost of pleading guilty then it's not that good a deal. The vast majority of people who accept felony plea bargains are actually* guilty rather than innocent people who just want to get it out of the way. The rates are different for misdemeanors where a month in jail or a fine of a few thousand dollars may seem relatively convenient. One of the flaws in your analysis is the assumption that the probability of victory is easily calculable. I don't think you've thought this through, because interpretations of the law are usually wrangled over at appeal while trial courts confine themselves to findings of fact and typically rely on model jury instructions for defining the elements of the crimes in question.
* by actually, I mean they have knowingly committed some action that incurs criminal liability, as opposed to inadvertently incurring it due to lack of notice or somesuch.
Reduce the delta between expected sentences at trial and plea offers and this stops being the case for the accused who have a fair chance at winning while the accused with no chance of winning will still take the plea.
But again, the accused don't really know their chances, and if the prosecution or the judge makes an error they may be able to claim a mistrial or an improper conviction, or if the defense screws up in any way they can claim improper assistance of counsel (very popular this one). Basically the guilty have no incentive to skip the trial because they might get lucky. Right now some guy in Illinois who's supposed to be serving a 60 year murder sentence is being sought by law enforcement because he was sent to court to face some additional drug charge, acquitted on a technicality, and mistakenly released from custody [dit: he's been caught]. If you're actually guilty of a crime and all the evidence is stacked against you, you might as well give the trial a whirl: you have nothing much to lose and fighting your case gives you something to occupy your time with, even if the odds of success are not much better than the lottery.
I mean, how exactly do you expect prosecutors to negotiate guilty pleas if they don't actually have anything to offer? That'd be like haggling with someone who just keeps demanding the same price over and over.
It is kind of tautological. What it isn't is consistent with the existing CFAA and the drug laws.
>This might seem excessive if you aren't familiar with teh criminal justice system, but it's not that long since we were willing to hang horse thieves and nobody found that idea remarkable.
The days of hanging horse thieves were also the days when black people were slaves, women couldn't vote and "witches" were burned at the stake, and nobody at the time found those things remarkable either. We've made a lot of progress since then. I believe we can still make some more.
>Well, how about that CEO in Iowa who robbed $216 million from a pension fund and was sentenced yesterday to 50 years in prison; what do you think an appropriate maximum should be for financial crimes like that?
I didn't mean to suggest that all nonviolent crimes should not be felonies, merely that felony nonviolent crimes should be the exception rather than the rule. I don't have a problem with felony penalties for serious financial crimes. Profit motive and intent to cause non-speculative provable high damages tends to remove things from the realm of mistakes that generally honest people can sometimes make.
> What about the situation where the maximum penalty is not that high, but someone commits multiple offenses?
If you mean actually multiple offenses (e.g. someone steals a set of lock picks and then uses them to break into a toolshed; it's two separate offenses), I don't have a problem with that. If you mean someone did one thing but it violates thirteen overlapping laws, that seems ridiculous to me. Prosecutors should not be allowed to charge a single underlying action with more than one crime; pick one and commit to it. Moreover, we shouldn't have such a degree of overlap in the law. It should not be the case that "everyone is guilty of something." That only enables prosecutors to find someone they don't like and then look for (and easily find) something they can be charged with rather than uncovering a criminal act and charging the person who committed it.
>Have you ever read the sentencing guidelines or looked at cases where they're argued at appeal? They are very narrowly defined and specific.
Some of them are narrow and specific. Some of them aren't. The ones that aren't are still problematic. Here are some examples from "Computer Fraud":
A substantial part of a fraudulent scheme was committed from outside the United States? [You don't live in the United States, or your "accomplice" doesn't, or you went on vacation with your laptop a couple of times.]
The offense otherwise involved sophisticated means? [She's a witch! Burn her!]
Offense involved an intent to obtain personal information? [Almost all computers contain personal information; good luck arguing that it wasn't your "intent" to "obtain" it in any given case.]
Moreover, even for the ones that are individually narrow, the "check the box" cumulative method causes them to become broad in the aggregate. Rather than having a narrow crime and if you didn't do it you go free, we instead get a broad crime that makes everyone guilty and the only question is how many boxes the prosecutor can check to ratchet up the penalty.
>I have read plenty of cases being prosecuted as attempted murder that don't make the news
It doesn't surprise me that prosecutors would file charges like that, but do these non-murderers actually plead guilty to murder or get convicted of it?
>The point of a plea bargain is that if you are probably not going to win at trial because the evidence is against you, then by accepting responsibility and saving the state the cost of a trial you are offered a sentence that reflects the reduced burden on the public. It seems to me that you want to have your cake and eat it.
It makes sense to offer someone a slightly reduced penalty to avoid a trial. When someone is all but guaranteed to be found guilty, the prospect of not having to go through the ordeal (because hey, it's not just the government that feels the burden of a trial) and receiving e.g. a six month sentence instead of the eight months they would get at trial is a fair bargain, and it doesn't significantly coerce anyone inclined to defend themselves into taking the deal. The issue is that the delta is too large: When you get offered six months and the sentencing guidelines say you would get multiple years if you lose at trial on top of your own personal expense of defending yourself, it stops making sense to try to defend yourself unless you are almost certain that you can win, and sometimes even then the burden of the trial (which is multiplied because the stakes are so high it allows you to spare no expense) can still exceed the burden of the sentence offered in the plea bargain.
>AT first blush, but when you figure in the opportunity cost of pleading guilty then it's not that good a deal.
I'm not sure what you mean by opportunity cost. The alternative to a plea is to go to trial and risk a much higher penalty if you lose. You have to discount as best you can the chance of winning by the cost of losing bigger than you would with a plea.
>One of the flaws in your analysis is the assumption that the probability of victory is easily calculable.
Why do you imagine accuracy is necessary for the conclusion? If all you know is that your lawyer tells you that it's more likely than not but also very much not guaranteed that you'll prevail in court, does that leave you in a substantially different decision making posture from knowing that the chances are exactly 75.4%? If anything the inability to predict accurately is likely to make people more risk averse and more likely for an innocent person to accept a plea.
And this calculus is exacerbated by the fact that the prosecutor has about as good an idea as defense counsel how strong their case is and will tailor the plea offer to the strength of their case, with the result that the people more likely to be innocent are still offered plea bargains specifically calculated in order to make them take the offer rather than go to trial.
>Basically the guilty have no incentive to skip the trial because they might get lucky.
I don't understand how you can say that risking an order of magnitude higher penalty is "no incentive" -- the numbers speak for themselves. If there is no incentive then why does almost no one go to trial?
>I mean, how exactly do you expect prosecutors to negotiate guilty pleas if they don't actually have anything to offer? That'd be like haggling with someone who just keeps demanding the same price over and over.
They should be able to offer a small reduction from what the result is expected be at trial. Offering to cut the penalty more than in half is entirely too coercive; the expected penalty at trial should be less than double what plea offers are currently. For the criminals who are caught dead to rights, it would still make perfect sense to take the deal in exchange for a small reduction, because by stipulation they can't win and their lawyers should know that. In contrast, if prosecutors have charged a case where the defendant has a significant chance to prevail, that case should go to court -- and if that happens too often to be economical then either the law needs to be changed or prosecutors ought to stop charging so many questionable cases.
The days of hanging horse thieves were also the days when black people were slaves, women couldn't vote and "witches" were burned at the stake, and nobody at the time found those things remarkable either.
Well no, I think you'll find that those events are rather more spread out over time, for one thing, and that comparing the penalties for specific verifiable acts with systematic but arbitrary discrimination against classes of people doesn't really take your argument anywhere. Stealing a horse is a factual matter which can often be established very easily, and the severe penalty was a rational response to the fact that losing a horse was a often major blow to the victim's livelihood or prospects of survival. This is wholly different to saying someone is inferior because of their ethnicity or gender, or because they have traffic with imaginary beings whose existence cannot be proven.
It should not be the case that "everyone is guilty of something."
But they're not, and people who make the claim that they are tend to cherry-pick their examples. There's a meme that floats around HN to the effect that you could pluck some random person off the street and find enough laws that they're breaking to put them away for years, so we're pretty much living in a police state. This is simply not true.
A substantial part of a fraudulent scheme was committed from outside the United States? [You don't live in the United States, or your "accomplice" doesn't, or you went on vacation with your laptop a couple of times.] The offense otherwise involved sophisticated means? [She's a witch! Burn her!]
Oh FFS. Sophisticated means simply points to the degree of elaboration involved in criminal behavior and thus to degree of intent. It's the same in murder trials; the most severe penalties are given to people who murder by lying-in-wait for a victim or using some method like poison which demonstrates extensive forethought, as opposed to loss of self-control, such as a shooting someone you just had a fight with. These concepts of intent being proportional to criminal culpability are far from new, and they're not vague because they are evaluated in the context of precedent.
Offense involved an intent to obtain personal information? [Almost all computers contain personal information; good luck arguing that it wasn't your "intent" to "obtain" it in any given case.]
It's the prosecution's job to prove intent, and it's very easy to shoot holes in it if it's incidental to the prosecution's main case.
>I have read plenty of cases being prosecuted as attempted murder that don't make the news
It doesn't surprise me that prosecutors would file charges like that, but do these non-murderers actually plead guilty to murder or get convicted of it?
Well, it's kind of hard to get convicted of murder if you are charged with attempted murder, now isn't it? My point is that when you hear of two people being in a bar fight you assume that it wasn't that severe, whereas I find nothing remarkable in the idea that a bar fight can escalate into an attempt on someone's life.
[...] people more likely to be innocent are still offered plea bargains specifically calculated in order to make them take the offer rather than go to trial.
People more likely to be innocent are also more likely to go to trial. Prosecutors don't want to bring cases that they can lose. As with the Aaron Swartz case, and as with virtually every death penalty appeals case, innocense often becomes a proxy for third parties' wishes about how things could be rather than how they actually were.
I don't understand how you can say that risking an order of magnitude higher penalty is "no incentive" -- the numbers speak for themselves. If there is no incentive then why does almost no one go to trial?
You're not following my argument. I'm saying that if we implement your notion of drastically reducing the difference between the offered plea and the sentence a prosecutor will seek at trial, then criminals would have no incentive to avoid the trial. Think about it: if I asked you to plead guilty in return for 10 years, or face the possibility of a ten-year sentence at trial, you'd go trial, wouldn't you?
They should be able to offer a small reduction from what the result is expected be at trial. Offering to cut the penalty more than in half is entirely too coercive; the expected penalty at trial should be less than double what plea offers are currently.
Why a factor of two, based on what? If you are obviously guilty and you don't like the prosecution's offer, you can always reject the plea bargain but plead guilty and make a case in the sentencing phase.
I agree with you that US sentencing in general is too draconian and that prosecutors often abuse their bargaining power. But you're proposing procedural solutions to a problem that is arguably the result of excessive proceduralism, viz. the exhaustive and cumulative nature of sentencing guidelines. You want say you want laws that are very narrowly tailored and specific, and to a large extent that's how things are. We might be better off with more vague laws that left judges more freedom to look at the totality of the circumstances, but some of the time that's going to result in drastic over-sentencing. Procedural specificity is a double-edged sword; if you don't want to see sentences of one day longer than the very specific offenses charges (because that would be unjust) then you have a hard time arguing for sentences that are shorter than the specific offenses indicated by the available evidence.
The issue is not that judges have the discretion to impose lower penalties in cases that warrant it, the issue is that their need to do so has become the rule rather than the exception. There are supposed to be checks and balances: Congress should enact a sensible maximum penalty so that it limits the scope of the damage when the judiciary makes a mistake, and judges have discretion to impose lower than the maximum penalties in specific cases to limit the scope of the damage when Congress makes a mistake.
But Congress has abdicated their role. They've taken the judicial discretion that ought to have been a rarely needed relief valve and built the entire criminal justice system on top of it by imposing ludicrous maximum penalties and leaving it to the courts to sort it out. In consequence the check that Congress is supposed to be imposing on the courts effectively no longer exists, and if the courts get it wrong then there is nothing to stop it.
Throw in that the plea bargaining system bypasses even the courts in the overwhelming majority of cases and you have the recipe for prosecutorial discretion becoming outcome determinative.
The maximum sentence is not the target sentence. The target sentences are given by the federal sentencing guidelines. Judges have the discretion to give lower sentences in situations that warrant them, and have the discretion to go up to the maximums in situations that warrant them. But by and large they hew pretty closely to the sentencing guidelines.
I'm not sure how that addresses the issue of too much judicial latitude on the top end. Giving judges discretion to reduce a sentence makes good sense. Giving them discretion to go up (or equivalently to go anywhere which is "down" from the stars) is abdicating the duty of Congress and inviting injustice, and the uncertainty provides undue leverage to prosecutors in plea negotiations, especially for an accused with little experience with the justice system. And the uncertainty isn't just in the judge's adherence to the guidelines, it's in what goes into the calculation. The guidelines are obviously very complicated ("43 offense levels" etc.) and you don't get to present your case to a jury and learn their findings of fact before deciding to take a plea, so whenever there is a fact in dispute that causes an order of magnitude difference in the guideline sentence, the guidelines force the accused to take an unduly large risk in going to trial.
Moreover, the sentencing guidelines are still full of harsh penalties. When Congress presents the authors of the guidelines with a maximum penalty of 25 years, it makes a five year prison term seem generous to the accused, notwithstanding that it is in actual fact an extremely harsh prison sentence in absolute terms.
And, correct me if I'm wrong, whether something is a felony is based on the maximum penalty rather than the imposed penalty. So even if your actual sentence is "only" a number of months under the sentencing guidelines and in practice, you're still a felon for the rest of your life with all of the disqualifications that come with it if the maximum penalty exceeded a year.
I don't think it's too much to ask for Congress to better differentiate between more and less serious crimes and to set appropriate maximum penalties for each.
So basically you want Congress and the Judiciary to only ever make sentences shorter, yes? Now, I do think Us sentences are too long and serve little social purpose, but I'm a rehabilitationist (probably because I'm a Euro utilitarian type), whereas a majority of Americans seem to be retributionist, and deontological ones at that. In general, Americans like throwing the book at criminals, or people they perceive to be criminals.
>So basically you want Congress and the Judiciary to only ever make sentences shorter, yes?
I didn't say "ever" -- if sentences were too low then the maximums should go up, but we are clearly in no danger of that happening because as you point out, "Americans like throwing the book at criminals, or people they perceive to be criminals." There is a reason that we don't elect Supreme Court justices.
I'm not disputing that what he's charged with (nothing that whitehats and journos don't do all the time) doesn't suck, or that potential maximum sentences in computer crime aren't oddly out of whack at times.
But lets cut the crap - Barret was a target because he dedicated a considerable amount of his time to being the mouth piece of some of the more radicalized groups inside anonymous, who went out of their way to directly antagonize the US government over and over, the more public the better.
If you're going to ask as a spokesman for an ongoing criminal enterprise that are making fools out of law enforcment you'd better hope to hell they get caught before too long. Because you will always represent a decent 2nd place trophy for them if push comes to shove.
I'm not saying it's right, it's just realism. It's nothing that wouldn't go down the same way (or much worse) in a vast majority of nations.
It's like rolling your cat in bacon grease and sending it out to play with the mountain lions. No doubt you loved your pet and it's sad that it died. And maybe you're dumb enough that you didn't realize how stupid that was in advance.
But you can't really blame the mountain lions, it's just their nature.
Seems like the best way to be the mouthpiece of an organization considered criminal by the DoJ would be to be one of it's lawyers. I would imagine that gives you some degree of immunity in cases where you aren't actually doing something illegal, just linking to it like in the case of Barrett Brown. For example, something like withholding information necessary for a criminal investigation would be protected under attorney client privilege, would it not?
You're right that I'm not an active part of the solution, here. If you have the energy to actively campaign against every injustice you know of in this world or anything even close then I honestly thank you for working so hard for the public. From where I sit though, most of the world appears corrupt and injust to varying degrees, many far worse than what's going down here. So I pick other fights.
And while I have no illusion that I'm somehow being of any real help here, i think it is fair to say that pointing out that it is extremely unsafe to play in traffic is a reasonable approach to reducing the number of people who will get hit by a bus.
not the best choice of words i agree. They do at times bear some similarities with what I might call "freedom fighters" - but that is also usually true of people that the US labels terrorists.
Facing 100 years so that he'll waive his constitutional right to a trial (undoubtedly before jury entirely incompetent in the matter) and accept a mere 10 years in a plea bargain.
He's not facing 100 years for god's sake.It's ironic seeing you complain about juries being incompetent when you're showing off such ignorance of the legal system.
I think it's been shown that jury trials typically have much larger penalties than plea bargains.
It's like in a developing country, where you can bribe the policeman to "make it go away". The only difference seems to be, in the US the police don't benefit from the lack of process, and tax payers have to fund more prisons.
That is if it gets to a jury trial. If he's smart, he'll plea bargain, give up some of his homies and take a ten year stint in a federal institution somewhere. If he can afford a decent attorney, he might even get a few charges dropped.
Just as an FYI, the feds pile on indictments as a way to gain leverage. Since the federal government doesn't like hackers much, when they finally catch one, they're going to squeeze him until he gives up names or enough information to catch other Anons.
Look what they were able to get out of Xavier Monsegur.
haven't you been following the Aaron Swartz case at all? it is precisely this common, state-sponsored miscarriage of justice that people are protesting.
Why does US have such a stupid system that seems to be abused to get people to accept plea bargains, which should be illegal in the first place, anyway? Is there any other country where they "stack" sentences on top of each other? Maximum sentence should be 20 or 25 years for 99.9% of criminals, and only the most cruel ones (mass murderers, etc) should get "life".
So he's facing 100 years for releasing thousands of credit card numbers and security codes. He was leaking information and the numbers were not the motivation. Seems quite harsh, but am I missing something?
Edit: He also appears to have just posted a link. Unless he actually uploaded the data, hopefully he's acquitted for that. By this standard, wouldn't Google be guilty of all sorts of terrible crimes?
I read the indictment, and indeed, it appears that they charged him for sharing a link to a pastebin of credit card numbers from Stratfor customers on IRC. It's an absurd charge, and I hope it gets dropped.
What he's in real hot water for is threatening a specific FBI agent, that agent's family and law enforcement in general. I also seem to recall reading that he posted something along the lines of "if any heavily armed people dressed as law enforcement show up at my home I'm going to shoot them because they're probably zetas dressed as cops".
> He also appears to have just posted a link. Unless he actually uploaded the data, hopefully he's acquitted for that. By this standard, wouldn't Google be guilty of all sorts of terrible crimes?
Why? Are you playing naive? Information today is the ultimate power, those surveillance systems are operated by the most powerful people in the world. A guy takes actions against them, how shocking he's getting punished.
That's the problem. The only way to guarantee serving a reasonable amount of time instead of "he murdered his family and wore their skins to work" time is through plea bargaining, which perverts the justice system.
The "maximum sentence" isn't even the recommended sentence that the accused would be having to plea bargain against, which is determined by the Federal sentencing guidelines.
We went over all of this with Aaron's case, and yet people apparently still refuse to pay attention to how the U.S. legal system works, and instead continue to use MPAA/RIAA tactics when discussing these cases. I have to say it's certainly not very heartening to know that there is seemingly no ideology that won't use propaganda just as soon as it suits their cause. :(
Is it in any way conceivable that the so-called "maximum sentence" could, speaking legally not about averages or practicalities, be applied in these cases?
As far as I can tell, it is legally possible. And that's a big problem. Because it exposes the defendant to an exceptional amount of risk, regardless of their innocence or the facts of the case. It makes people much less likely to actually make use of their rights and to go to trial because no sane person is going to let even a tiny chance of going to prison for a century happen if they have a better out through plea bargaining.
This case is a perfect example of that. If the defendant was facing a more reasonable maximum penalty such as, say, a year or two in prison he would likely be far more emboldened to take it to trial and have his day in court.
Risk is simply a probability, so it's inappropriate to treat a risk with a probability of approximately epsilon the same as a level of risk that could actually be seen on a pie chart.
You're saying that because the risk of hitting the maximum sentence is not actually zero, that the defendant is exposed to an exceptional amount of risk, but this doesn't even make logical sense.
Either way, whatever else defense attorneys might say to the prosecutors, judges, and the public, they know how the risks translate for their client even better than you or I do and have a professional responsibility to inform their client of the same.
So there's no reason for a defendant to freak out about a theoretical maximum sentence, they should only be worried about the one the judge might actually assign after all the arguments and motions are made.
> If the defendant was facing a more reasonable maximum penalty such as, say, a year or two in prison he would likely be far more emboldened to take it to trial and have his day in court.
The maximum should be whatever is most effective for the interests of justice overall, not just whatever is most convenient for whoever happens to be sitting in the defendant's seat that day.
I have a First Amendment right to say and speak my mind, but that doesn't mean I would go picketing funerals with hateful messages like WBC. I have a Second Amendment right to bear arms, but that doesn't mean I would stand near a school carrying a Bushmaster. And I would certainly never expect the government to provide me a Bushmaster and have me stand outside a school just to demonstrate that they care deeply about my rights.
So yes, by all means, take your day in court if it comes to it, but it's not the government's job to ensure that is the only course available to you the defendant, it's the government's job to secure the blessings of liberty for all of the people.
To get the maximum sentence for a Federal crime, you have to (1) be the Hitler or Moriarty of that type of crime, and (2) have an extensive prior criminal record.
Well they linked to Barrett Brown stating that many of them (Anonymous) would not hesitate to employ the same amoral "might makes right" tactics that they deplore from the government, if they found it necessary:
"considering a man in Houston recieved only 42 months for threatening to blow up an FBI building, and a former dentist got 18 months for threatening to kill an FBI agent"
Nonsense! I bet those guys were also facing decades if not centuries of jail. What they got after the trial or a plea bargain is another story.
Interesting slight of hand comparing maximum possible jail time for three separate offenses to actual sentences for one.