7 ms·

So, will they keep him alive for 40k years or how does that work? Isn’t it a little silly?

delecti 4y ago
Things like this aren't a single charge with a 40k year sentence, it's ~2000 charges of ~20 years, served sequentially. It means that if he's found not guilty of ~1999 of those charges, he still serves 20 years for the 2000th. And conversely, if he is found guilty of all ~2000 separate crimes, why shouldn't he receive a sentence for each? It might seem like a silly result, but what would you propose changing?
- barbazoo 4y ago
  > will they keep him alive for 40k years or how does that work? Imagine how awful that would be. > ~2000 charges of ~20 years And that makes me wonder. Maybe that would be too harsh a sentence then. Do we want to basically "end" someone's life at an insane cost to the tax payer for something with no impact on others other than financial? I have no answer, it just feels somewhat suboptimal to me.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    I mean, yes. If you steal a billion dollars from a whole bunch of middle class folks, you are, in aggregate "ending" a whole lot of life in small amounts distributed across many people.
    - barbazoo 4y ago
      Are you ending their lives in a comparable way though? Especially if there are ways to get back what you stole as it is often the case? I just feel like the aggregate punishment does not at all fit the crime in a case like this.
      - colechristensen 4y ago
        Often, yes. A problem with money is that it abstracts away harm so that a person stops thinking like it's so bad to take money away from people because it's just money, when in fact you're actually taking away the things people can do with that money. Did zero people end up homeless as a result of this fraud? Did zero people lose a job? Did zero people turn to crime to get by? Did zero people get pushed over the edge to suicide? How many years of life were lost due to stress or more difficult life situations? To depression? To hunger? I doubt any of those numbers are zero. The stories are just hidden behind the abstraction of money. Crypto companies preying on gullible people more vulnerable to the loss of large sums of money and then losing their money due to management incompetence and fraud are indeed responsible for a lot of real world harm.
        barbazoo 4y ago
        That's a good point. I hope the punishment was in fact based on actual real world impacts (of having stolen that money) that you described and not simply based on some monetary amount multiplied by number of occurrences.
        colechristensen 4y ago
        It's just what prosecutors are accusing and the sentence attached in their proposal. A new charge for each of the people affected, which was a couple thousand apparently. One doesn't have to read all that much into the wishlist of prosecutors. Throwing a lot at the wall and seeing what sticks is a pretty standard practice. But what we have here is essentially somebody leading a bank taking all the money left after losing a bunch of it to hacks and running away with it. Whatever it was, it was an enormous amount of money and not the kind of thing anyone needs to be particularly forgiving about. Life in prison for stealing between $20MM and $125MM from customers isn't out of the question. (on top of the fraud that lost them the rest of their money)
  - AdrianB1 4y ago
    On the positive side, punishment in 2022 completely removes the risk of impalement[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impalement#Ottoman_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impalement#Ottoman_Empire
- z3c0 4y ago
  Why would they count the terms sequentially when prison sentences are typically served concurrently? Is that not the case here?
  - synu 4y ago
    It’s up to the judge, some of the factors are listed here: https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/blog/consecutive-vs-concurrent-sentences/ https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/blog/consecutive-vs-concurrent-...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Analemma_ 4y ago
  Eventually, when we have brain uploading, we will make 2000 copies of the defendant and have them each serve a 20 year sentence, and then merge them back together at the end, leaving them with the memory of having served 40,000 years.
  - Bakary 4y ago
    I honestly think the only rational reaction to brain upload technology existing is to erase as many traces of your existence as possible before self-terminating. Bet Pascal didn't picture this wager
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  This is prosecutors gaming the system to try and make something stick. If you're comfortable with prosecutors being able to play games with people's lives because they've made a personal judgment call to maximize their ability to punish people, great! The system is working the way you want it to. Not everyone is comfortable with that.
  - delecti 4y ago
    I'm broadly in favor of shorter (or no) prison sentences for most offenses, but my empathy doesn't extend quite as far for someone who runs a crypto scam to dupe and and steal $2B from thousands of middle-class people. I think that most white collar offenses are disgustingly under-punished, and the knowledge that this will likely come down considerably means I'm not at all offended by this.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      Which crimes would you reduce/remove prison sentences? Murder, rape, assault, fraud, robbery, kidnapping?
      - delecti 4y ago
        It was probably imprecise to say "most", because I suppose I don't know the proportional breakdown of which crimes led to all of the convictions, or the breakdown of what all the crimes are. That said, I think most property crime is motivated by desperation, and prison rarely does anything to help improve the lives of someone who only resorted to anti-social behavior because they had little other choice. So I think most robbery should only be punished because of the violent aspect, and most burglary should be "punished" with halfway houses or a system like the Civilian Conservation Corps. I also think drug related crime is a huge waste of time, and that the damage caused by drug dealing/smuggling/manufacturing is a fairly direct result of it being illegal, rather than intrinsic to the "industry". I think the justice system would need to be entirely reformed before it would make sense to reduce prison sentences for violent crime like murder, rape, or kidnapping. Though I think we're doing more harm than good throwing such people in prison for decades without any real rehabilitation involved.
- tzs 4y ago
  In the US those would likely be grouped for sentencing, and he'd get somewhere near whatever the longest possible sentence is for fraud under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines with enhancements for the total amount of damage caused, maybe racketeering, and maybe a few others. It would essentially be treated as one big crime with 2000 victims, not 2000 separate crimes. In the US whenever you see a story about an incredibly long sentence it is almost always because someone did not take into account grouping for sentencing, or they did not take into account that a person is often charges with multiple levels of a crime from the same act, and if convicted on more than one of those charges they are only sentenced on the most severe. For example in most jurisdictions in if I were to shoot you to death the US there would be multiple degrees of murder that I might be charged with, maybe also multiple degrees of negligent homicide and manslaughter and maybe even others. My sentence if convicted would be the sentence of whichever of those has the longest sentence. Unfortunately in the US when the Department of Justice issues a press release touting charging someone they don't take those things into account, and so the press release says the person is facing some number of years that can be several times too high. I'd hold back on believing that he's really facing ~40k years in Turkey until someone familiar with Turkish law and sentencing verifies that things really so work that way in Turkey.
- t_mann 4y ago
  There's infinitely more than one way to turn a list of numbers into one number, not just summing them up. In some countries you serve the maximum sentence out of all those that you've been convicted for.
mikotodomo 4y ago
I think a more fitting punishment would be to make an AI that measures how much pain he caused each of his customers, and then makes him sit through that pain. It would probably take hundreds of years, but the AI could make him live that long too. But I don't know if this is ethical. Someone chime in?
- npteljes 4y ago
  Sounds like "an eye for an eye". Apparently "it leaves the whole world blind", and that is why it's undesirable. The second thing is that there's no way to measure pain, and also what we feel as pain is more like two things, actual pain, as in nervous system reaction, and suffering, which you create in your mind. There's two-way causation between the two by default, but the effect of one on the other is not deterministic, and can be learnt to that you feel pain, but do not suffer (as much you did previously). So we couldn't measure the pain before, and now we cannot measure the suffering to an even lesser degree. The third thing is, which usually comes up with regards to crime, is punishment vs rehabilitation. What you describe with the AI, as it stands, is punishment. It's up the person being punished to learn something there. I don't have high expectation of someone who's returned to society after such lengthy torture (or are we killing them afterwards, or keeping them otherwise captive?). In case you're a victim of a crime, or just someone affected, it's natural to thirst punishment for the perpetrator. On a societal level however, it seems like that we're better off with rehabilitation. It creates a better social environment for all. https://www.uib.no/en/news/100126/norwegian-prisons-rehabilitate-criminal-offenders https://www.uib.no/en/news/100126/norwegian-prisons-rehabili...
  - mikotodomo 4y ago
    I disagree with the first paragraph (because eventually we will have the technology) but agree with the second, which is a good point.

Things like this aren't a single charge with a 40k year sentence, it's ~2000 charges of ~20 years, served sequentially. It means that if he's found not guilty of ~1999 of those charges, he still serves 20 years for the 2000th. And conversely, if he is found guilty of all ~2000 separate crimes, why shouldn't he receive a sentence for each? It might seem like a silly result, but what would you propose changing?

barbazoo 4y ago
> will they keep him alive for 40k years or how does that work? Imagine how awful that would be. > ~2000 charges of ~20 years And that makes me wonder. Maybe that would be too harsh a sentence then. Do we want to basically "end" someone's life at an insane cost to the tax payer for something with no impact on others other than financial? I have no answer, it just feels somewhat suboptimal to me.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  I mean, yes. If you steal a billion dollars from a whole bunch of middle class folks, you are, in aggregate "ending" a whole lot of life in small amounts distributed across many people.
  - barbazoo 4y ago
    Are you ending their lives in a comparable way though? Especially if there are ways to get back what you stole as it is often the case? I just feel like the aggregate punishment does not at all fit the crime in a case like this.
    - colechristensen 4y ago
      Often, yes. A problem with money is that it abstracts away harm so that a person stops thinking like it's so bad to take money away from people because it's just money, when in fact you're actually taking away the things people can do with that money. Did zero people end up homeless as a result of this fraud? Did zero people lose a job? Did zero people turn to crime to get by? Did zero people get pushed over the edge to suicide? How many years of life were lost due to stress or more difficult life situations? To depression? To hunger? I doubt any of those numbers are zero. The stories are just hidden behind the abstraction of money. Crypto companies preying on gullible people more vulnerable to the loss of large sums of money and then losing their money due to management incompetence and fraud are indeed responsible for a lot of real world harm.
      - barbazoo 4y ago
        That's a good point. I hope the punishment was in fact based on actual real world impacts (of having stolen that money) that you described and not simply based on some monetary amount multiplied by number of occurrences.
        colechristensen 4y ago
        It's just what prosecutors are accusing and the sentence attached in their proposal. A new charge for each of the people affected, which was a couple thousand apparently. One doesn't have to read all that much into the wishlist of prosecutors. Throwing a lot at the wall and seeing what sticks is a pretty standard practice. But what we have here is essentially somebody leading a bank taking all the money left after losing a bunch of it to hacks and running away with it. Whatever it was, it was an enormous amount of money and not the kind of thing anyone needs to be particularly forgiving about. Life in prison for stealing between $20MM and $125MM from customers isn't out of the question. (on top of the fraud that lost them the rest of their money)
- AdrianB1 4y ago
  On the positive side, punishment in 2022 completely removes the risk of impalement[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impalement#Ottoman_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impalement#Ottoman_Empire
z3c0 4y ago
Why would they count the terms sequentially when prison sentences are typically served concurrently? Is that not the case here?
- synu 4y ago
  It’s up to the judge, some of the factors are listed here: https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/blog/consecutive-vs-concurrent-sentences/ https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/blog/consecutive-vs-concurrent-...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Analemma_ 4y ago
Eventually, when we have brain uploading, we will make 2000 copies of the defendant and have them each serve a 20 year sentence, and then merge them back together at the end, leaving them with the memory of having served 40,000 years.
- Bakary 4y ago
  I honestly think the only rational reaction to brain upload technology existing is to erase as many traces of your existence as possible before self-terminating. Bet Pascal didn't picture this wager
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
This is prosecutors gaming the system to try and make something stick. If you're comfortable with prosecutors being able to play games with people's lives because they've made a personal judgment call to maximize their ability to punish people, great! The system is working the way you want it to. Not everyone is comfortable with that.
- delecti 4y ago
  I'm broadly in favor of shorter (or no) prison sentences for most offenses, but my empathy doesn't extend quite as far for someone who runs a crypto scam to dupe and and steal $2B from thousands of middle-class people. I think that most white collar offenses are disgustingly under-punished, and the knowledge that this will likely come down considerably means I'm not at all offended by this.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    Which crimes would you reduce/remove prison sentences? Murder, rape, assault, fraud, robbery, kidnapping?
    - delecti 4y ago
      It was probably imprecise to say "most", because I suppose I don't know the proportional breakdown of which crimes led to all of the convictions, or the breakdown of what all the crimes are. That said, I think most property crime is motivated by desperation, and prison rarely does anything to help improve the lives of someone who only resorted to anti-social behavior because they had little other choice. So I think most robbery should only be punished because of the violent aspect, and most burglary should be "punished" with halfway houses or a system like the Civilian Conservation Corps. I also think drug related crime is a huge waste of time, and that the damage caused by drug dealing/smuggling/manufacturing is a fairly direct result of it being illegal, rather than intrinsic to the "industry". I think the justice system would need to be entirely reformed before it would make sense to reduce prison sentences for violent crime like murder, rape, or kidnapping. Though I think we're doing more harm than good throwing such people in prison for decades without any real rehabilitation involved.
tzs 4y ago
In the US those would likely be grouped for sentencing, and he'd get somewhere near whatever the longest possible sentence is for fraud under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines with enhancements for the total amount of damage caused, maybe racketeering, and maybe a few others. It would essentially be treated as one big crime with 2000 victims, not 2000 separate crimes. In the US whenever you see a story about an incredibly long sentence it is almost always because someone did not take into account grouping for sentencing, or they did not take into account that a person is often charges with multiple levels of a crime from the same act, and if convicted on more than one of those charges they are only sentenced on the most severe. For example in most jurisdictions in if I were to shoot you to death the US there would be multiple degrees of murder that I might be charged with, maybe also multiple degrees of negligent homicide and manslaughter and maybe even others. My sentence if convicted would be the sentence of whichever of those has the longest sentence. Unfortunately in the US when the Department of Justice issues a press release touting charging someone they don't take those things into account, and so the press release says the person is facing some number of years that can be several times too high. I'd hold back on believing that he's really facing ~40k years in Turkey until someone familiar with Turkish law and sentencing verifies that things really so work that way in Turkey.
t_mann 4y ago
There's infinitely more than one way to turn a list of numbers into one number, not just summing them up. In some countries you serve the maximum sentence out of all those that you've been convicted for.

mikotodomo 4y ago

I think a more fitting punishment would be to make an AI that measures how much pain he caused each of his customers, and then makes him sit through that pain. It would probably take hundreds of years, but the AI could make him live that long too. But I don't know if this is ethical. Someone chime in?

npteljes 4y ago
Sounds like "an eye for an eye". Apparently "it leaves the whole world blind", and that is why it's undesirable. The second thing is that there's no way to measure pain, and also what we feel as pain is more like two things, actual pain, as in nervous system reaction, and suffering, which you create in your mind. There's two-way causation between the two by default, but the effect of one on the other is not deterministic, and can be learnt to that you feel pain, but do not suffer (as much you did previously). So we couldn't measure the pain before, and now we cannot measure the suffering to an even lesser degree. The third thing is, which usually comes up with regards to crime, is punishment vs rehabilitation. What you describe with the AI, as it stands, is punishment. It's up the person being punished to learn something there. I don't have high expectation of someone who's returned to society after such lengthy torture (or are we killing them afterwards, or keeping them otherwise captive?). In case you're a victim of a crime, or just someone affected, it's natural to thirst punishment for the perpetrator. On a societal level however, it seems like that we're better off with rehabilitation. It creates a better social environment for all. https://www.uib.no/en/news/100126/norwegian-prisons-rehabilitate-criminal-offenders https://www.uib.no/en/news/100126/norwegian-prisons-rehabili...
- mikotodomo 4y ago
  I disagree with the first paragraph (because eventually we will have the technology) but agree with the second, which is a good point.