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Articles like this utterly piss me the fuck off. A few weeks ago, I was doing hard time with people who, due to fairly outrageous "re-offender" statues, were s

• disposition2 11y ago
  > jury doesn't understand it? Everytime I hear a finance person use the excuse of 'you wouldn't understand' to a complex, I can't help but correlate it to a developer who's obfuscated code tell another developer they wouldn't understand, without acknowledging that they obfuscated the code. I'm sure I understand, you just don't want me to because then it would be obvious you are just ripping people off to make more money for yourself / company. Kind of like how the government has used 'enhanced interrogation' rather than the common definition of torture to get around breaking the law.
  • unimpressive 11y ago
    This sort of plausible deniability depends on there being financial instruments which are genuinely difficult to understand. I'm sure you would agree that there are in fact mechanisms and systems in computer programming which would be fairly difficult to explain quickly. Especially in terms which are anything approaching accuracy.
    • collyw 11y ago
      As software professionals we (some of us take) pride in trying to build stable systems that are decoupled and not overly complex. Financial systems seem to be build the opposite way.
      • lmm 11y ago
        A finance person would probably say the exact opposite - most deals are just stacking two or three obvious, properly factored/decoupled abstractions together, whereas software people seem (to a finance person) to deliberately complicate things.
      • pjmorris 11y ago
        Richard Bookstaber makes very similar points about the financial system in 'A Demon of Our Own Design', highly recommended. When the investment banks were partnerships, the partners had plenty of 'skin in the game', and favored stable systems. Going public took the pressure off of the leadership's individual fortunes... and stability seems to have suffered.
      • VLM 11y ago
        Yet think of surviorship bias, isn't the code most likely to end up in front of a jury the hackiest, most complicated, least understandable, least documented stuff out there? Think of the VW "scandal" at what point does a piece of code go from being a really effective emissions blocker to being an illegal emissions blocker? If they implemented and trained up a neural net then what piece of code is the violator, the guy who wrote the unit tests the neural net trained on, or the evolved coefficients in the network that humans never wrote, or the manager who told them to write an emissions routine using a NN or the regulators who entrapped them by knowingly writing bad regs with the intention of the .gov selecting winners and losers by selective prosecution?
      • harryh 11y ago
        They only seem that way to you because you do not deal in finance. A system can only be as simple as the business needs it's supporting whether than be a piece of code or a financial product. Some pieces of code are VERY complex because the business demands it. Same goes for financial instruments.
  • SilasX 11y ago
    It's been my experience that this is very generally true, and you don't need the "finance" qualifier: people hate having their roles demystified to the point that they often don't even try to improve their own understanding of it. Even if the person isn't greedy, they'll resent the loss of status that comes with, "wait, all you do is add entries on the CMS interface?" or "all you do is make the risks less obvious to auditors?" As Mal says, "50% of the human race is middlemen, and they don't take kindly to being eliminated."
    • meatysnapper 11y ago
      We should make a up a spurious tale about an enormous stargoat eating the sun and send them on ark to colonize another planet.
      • monocasa 11y ago
        Watch out, you don't want to die of a public telephone transmitted virus.
  • ChuckMcM 11y ago
    I wonder if a form of activism here might be to seek out Jury duty as a way to make sure the Jury does understand. To be honest I have never even thought about walking down to the Superior Court building and saying "Hi, I'm here to volunteer to be on a jury, what do you have today?"
    • nicholasjarnold 11y ago
      This raises an interesting point, but neglects the fact that it's not possible (for good reason if you think about it) to simply volunteer for jury duty. In order to be eligible in most (all?) jurisdictions one must simply register to vote. Neglecting the fallacy of the presumption that one can just volunteer, it is interesting to think about the way the world might be shaped should "more educated" individuals be the ones who solely shape public policy and case law. It's not very democratic in the pure sense of the meaning, but certainly interesting as a thought experiment.
      • ghaff 11y ago
        >In order to be eligible in most (all?) jurisdictions one must simply register to vote. I've seen states at least claim that being registered to vote is not necessary to be called for jury duty. It gets a bit hand-wavy after that but supposedly they also draw from, at least, driver licenses as well.
        • 6502nerdface 11y ago
          Simply filing state income taxes as a resident is enough to get you in the (potential) jury pool for your locality, at least in NY.
    • c22 11y ago
      In my experience appearing too excited about performing jury duty is a sure way to not be selected.
  • scott_s 11y ago
    Keep in mind that in this circumstance, it's not the finance people who are claiming complexity. It appears to be the reaction from the jurors based on the case made by the prosecutors.
  • rayiner 11y ago
    Even good, clear, code is inscrutable complexity to a lay-person. Finance is no different. To me, it's more than a little ironic how often software professionals look at what finance professionals do and ask the equivalent of "why the hell does Twitter need all this code? It's just 140 character messages!"
    • ccvannorman 11y ago
      a fifteen minute conversation with a layperson about a particular code base will do just fine. "You know how a car is simple to operate, right? But you understand it has an engine and many moving parts? Well.. Twitter is just like that, and there are actually lots of small engines making sure the characters get from your keyboard to other people's eyes." > ... you just don't want me to because then it would be obvious you are just ripping people off to make more money for yourself / company. Agree. If your car pollutes more than other cars and runs on the blood of innocent consumers, hiding that in the explanation of how a regular car works is not an excuse. Anyone who says "You wouldn't understand" is hiding something. If you can't explain it to me, do you even know what the fuck you're talking about?
      • morgante 11y ago
        > Twitter is just like that, and there are actually lots of small engines making sure the characters get from your keyboard to other people's eyes." That's an abstract explanation of what Twitter's code is, it doesn't get you anywhere closer to being able to actually understand the code. Just like I wouldn't expect a layperson person to be able to find and fix a bug in a codebase, I don't think they can reliably evaluate the nuances of the financial system.
      • rayiner 11y ago
        So a guy is charged with tax accounting fraud for basically not putting some number into some entry in a spreadsheet when some external event happened, and instead putting that number into a different entry in the spreadsheet. You can't just say "you know how cars are complicated? Well so are spreadsheets. That's why this guy is guilty." Your analogy has to capture some legally-relevant dynamic of the system you are trying to explain. Imagine your case depends on proving that only a guilty person would have failed to shard a particular database. It's not enough to just explain at the highest possible level the concept of splitting up a database. You gotta get the jury to understand it enough to know why you do it, and why it would be so out of the norm to not do it in a particular situation that the person must have had a nefarious motive.
  • morgante 11y ago
    First off, this is coming from the prosecutorial side, who has every incentive to make the case as understandable as possible. Frankly, it's not surprising that the average person can't understand complex finance and thus complex financial litigation. > Everytime I hear a finance person use the excuse of 'you wouldn't understand' to a complex, I can't help but correlate it to a developer who's obfuscated code tell another developer they wouldn't understand, without acknowledging that they obfuscated the code. The difference is that a jury is not other finance people. I don't expect jurors to understand financial crimes any more than I expect a random member of the public to understand a complex computer bug.
  • harryh 11y ago
    I don't know about you particularly but I'm certain that there are a great many people who think that the financial system is ripping them off somehow when they really don't understand what's going on. Just look at High Frequency Trading & the Michael Lewis book. It comes up on HN every month or three and there are always people convinced that somehow these traders are "jumping in front of" other people's orders to steal their money when this is definitely not the case.
  • ellio 11y ago
    Check out the book "The Bankers' New Clothes," which addresses the intentionally obscure language of finance
• deleted 11y ago
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• beeboop 11y ago
  It's also disgusting that there are only two states where inmates can vote. More disgusting that there are states where felons can't vote, ever, for the rest of their life. Making a mistake shouldn't remove your ability to be represented.
  • n0us 11y ago
    The racial aspect of this is perhaps the most concerning. In my home state of Virginia we have one of the worst problems with this and somewhere around 20% of black individuals cannot vote. (http://www.naacp.org/page/-/advocacy%20papers/Silenced%20in%20VA-%20Citizens%20Without%20a%20Vote.pdf http://www.naacp.org/page/-/advocacy%20papers/Silenced%20in%...) while more than 7% of all individuals cannot vote. It amounts to a modern day 3/5ths clause and the worst part of it is that it's part of our constitution. Only the Governor himself can restore voting rights to an individual after they have been lost and while recent persons to hold office have been in favor of amending this part of the constitution, it's not a trivial process and in the mean time you have to get the felons themselves to apply to have their rights restored.
  • cubano 11y ago
    Great point...please don't get me started on this I've already embarrassed myself enough here today with my f-bomb tirade.
• micwawa 11y ago
  Agree.
• mtgx 11y ago
  The only reason the juries "don't understand it" is because the prosecutor doesn't want them to understand. Remember that recent cop Grand Jury indictment where the prosecutor had to "explain" for 3 weeks how...I guess the cop wasn't guilty? While in non-cop indictments, they somehow manage to indict people much sooner.
  • scott_s 11y ago
    You sincerely think that the prosecutors in the cases mentioned in the article purposefully made the case hard for the jury to understand, for the explicit purpose of losing the case?
    • coldtea 11y ago
      No, for the explicit purpose of making some good money off the table.
      • scott_s 11y ago
        I don't follow. How are the prosecutors making money by losing a case that they decided to prosecute?
        • Kliment 11y ago
          I'm not coldtea but the implication appears to be that they are being bribed
          • coldtea 11y ago
            Yes. Don't know about those specific cases but I know places where this happens a lot, and especially when it comes to white collar crime, but also mafia-with-a-legit-front kind of affairs.
            • scott_s 11y ago
              This is a conversational dead-end because there is both no evidence for it in this case, and no way to disprove it.
• scott_s 11y ago
  I think you misunderstood the point of this article. It's not that the prosecutors are "afraid" of losing a case, it's that they are demonstrably losing these cases. And the reason appears to be that the circumstances are too complex for juries to understand. That is a systemic problem, one which we don't have a good solution for. The response from the Justice Department seems to be, instead of failing at doing the same thing over-and-over, let's do a different, simpler thing. I agree that is not a good thing. But I don't think it's reasonable to argue they should keep doing the same thing over-and-over, expecting failure. And I don't have enough insight into the problem to say how they could successfully prosecute these complex cases.
  • bradleyjg 11y ago
    >> That is a systemic problem, one which we don't have a good solution for. There is a pretty straightforward solution. I'll leave to the reader whether or not it is a good one. Redefine the crimes so they are easier to prove. In many cases that is going to involve moving from a mens rea (guilty mental state) of intentionally to recklessly, negligently or even eliminating mens rea altogether and just requiring an actus reus (guilty act). In some cases that might mean criminalizing more acts of omission instead of requiring proof of an overt bad act. I want to be clear that this wouldn't be costless. It goes against much our existing framework for what makes people criminals. It would increase the chance that someone who made honest mistakes would be criminally punished. But remember Blackstone said that it is better for ten guilty men to go free than one man suffer, not one hundred, not one thousand and certainly not all the guilty men. And he was writing in an era when all felonies were capital crimes. A small percentage of murderers getting off on technicalities is something a society can live with, even be proud of in a strange way, but when the exception swallows the rule that society is playing with fire.
    • morgante 11y ago
      You're asking that we overturn centuries of jurisprudence just because you don't like bankers. I think that's a much bigger crime than anything financiers have supposedly committed.
• jules 11y ago
  Just like drug offenses are insignificant compared to "small" time white collar crime, small time white collar crime is insignificant compared to what's going on in the financial sector. It brought the world as we know it to the brink of collapse. Some people in the financial sector were stocking up on food, water, fuel and firearms in case society would experience a meltdown. Not only did no one get convicted, but it's back to business as usual. There seems to be a rule here. The punishment is inversely proportional to the scale of the crime.
• Asbostos 11y ago
  That's unfortunate about your drug conviction. Was the heroin really so attractive that you knowingly risked your career, livelihood and a year of your life for it or did you not understand the risks? I can appreciate you're angry but even if you don't like the law, you still have to follow it to keep yourself safe. Just as you would still have to pay off a protectionism gang to keep yourself safe. The individuals who lost money most directly in the financial crisis are the people who gambled with their money trying to make more free money without doing any work. They're as much to blame, even more so that they're continuing to make the same gambles without even blinking! If your retirement fund is invested with a Wall St firm, you're part of the problem. Go put it with a company that isn't known to repeatedly rip off its customers. If you can't find one, then put it in a savings account. If the interest is too low, then accept that it's OK to have the occasional financial crisis as long as you make money all the rest of the time.
• chatmasta 11y ago
  You knew carrying heroin was risking jail time. Bankers and white collar business men do not think they are risking jail time in their daily decision making. This is by design. As a crime, heroin possesion provides an easy way to assess guilty/not-guilty; the perpetrator either possesses heroin, or not. In contrast, white collar crimes do not provide an easy way to assess guilty/not-guilty. Clear fundamental truths (yes/no), beget clear legislation, beget clear enforcement. How do you sentence someone as guilty of a white collar crime? You need to rely on legislation to define the law, because the law is what businessmen consider on a day-to-day basis. If the law allows them to make a decision, they should have every right to make that decision without fear of later prosecution for it. The problem is not enforcement, it's legislation. If clearer laws defined the decision making affecting "white collar" crimes, then agencies like the SEC could implement clearer enforcement. Unfortunately the world changes faster than the regulatory environment, so this conundrum is unlikely to ever change. (sentencing length is another story)
• PhilWright 11y ago
  The problem is that the jury is made up of average people but they are expected to sit in judgement on something very complex and specialised. Instead I think that complex fraud cases should be made up of people that have expertise in that area. Or alternatively have a panel of three judges with expert knowledge sit in judgement.