10 ms·

To put this into its proper perspective, see table 7 here: https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/federal-sentencing-statistics

• ellis0n 3y ago
  It is bad to steal from lawyers, economists and judges at the same time. This has a negative impact on the court, in addition to the financial harm caused.
• stronglikedan 3y ago
  That's only one count of murder. One life destroyed. SBF destroyed numerous lives, so it is a relatively light sentence by that data.
• gjsman-1000 3y ago
  I'm not convinced by that; I think theft in many ways deserves a greater penalty. Imagine if I rob 10,000 people of $2,000. Some people won't feel it. Others will be suicidal and may even commit suicide partially from hopelessness. There also could have ramifications that last years into the future, and cascade. (Can't buy new car to replace old car, don't have enough money now. Old car broke, missed work, got fired, found new job elsewhere that pays less...)
• marcinzm 3y ago
  > If anything, it's excessive if you consider the nature of the crime relative to the nature of murder or kidnapping. I suspect the resulting number of shortened lives amongst all the people who lost $8 billion worth of their money due to the fraud is more than the number caused by a single murder.
  • vlovich123 3y ago
    I thought the “lost” money was simply due to poor accounting and actually found. > Kaplan said he had found that FTX customers lost $8 billion, FTX's equity investors lost $1.7 billion, and that lenders to the Alameda Research hedge fund Bankman-Fried founded lost $1.3 billion. https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-bankman-fried-be-sentenced-multi-billion-dollar-ftx-fraud-2024-03-28/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-bankman-fried-be-sent... Clearly the real crime is bilking investors out of their money. It’s also questionable whether they even ended up losing money given the rising price of crypto in the past year. It’s also interesting how this happened: > when it filed for bankruptcy after traders pulled $6 billion from the platform in three days and rival exchange Binance abandoned a rescue deal. https://www.reuters.com/technology/bankrupt-crypto-exchange-ftx-has-recovered-73-bln-assets-attorney-2023-04-12/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/bankrupt-crypto-exchange-... So basically the traders did a bank run and Sam ended up going to jail. It’s interesting that by contrast SVB leaders didn’t face any repercussions because they were part of the established ways of doing things even though that ended up being very costly for the government.
    • FireBeyond 3y ago
      > It’s also questionable whether they even ended up losing money given the rising price of crypto in the past year. Shkreli dealt with the "making people whole/replacing money you took": it's not okay to steal or defraud people just because you later make them whole or they don't even realize that you did. But even moreso, to your point: Please don't conflate the rising crypto price with SBF's intent. He didn't care about that. The fact that crypto rose and may have lessened the losses is entirely orthogonal to his intent, just a "fortunate" coincidence. It could equally have cratered. The people who are being recompensed are only being recompensed in part because of something entirely outside of SBF's control and intention.
      • vkou 3y ago
        It's worse than that. The only reason people can be made whole is because SBF was arrested for fraud, and all the funds got frozen. Given his track record, had he kept steering the firm for another year or two, he would have almost pissed away all the gains/potential gains from the crypto rally, and his customers would have found themselves in an even bigger hole. Also, Bernie Madoff could have just taken a ten year timeout, bought and rode the S&P 500, and had made his customers whole, too, so I guess he also did nothing wrong...
• FireBeyond 3y ago
  > If anything, it's excessive if you consider the nature of the crime relative to the nature of murder or kidnapping. It also affected tens of thousands of people more than a murder or kidnapping.
• quatrefoil 3y ago
  You're comparing to medians; is this a median crime?
• petertodd 3y ago
  > If anything, it's excessive if you consider the nature of the crime relative to the nature of murder or kidnapping. The value of a single human life is not infinite. In engineering and public policy, a value like $10 million / life is typically used to make trade-offs. SBF stole funds far in excess of that. Secondly, when funds of this scale are stolen, inevitably people wind up dying early from things like stress, and suicides.
  • flutas 3y ago
    > Secondly, when funds of this scale are stolen, inevitably people wind up dying early from things like stress, and suicides. Yep, it was mentioned in sentencing today by one of the victims. At least 3 have already committed suicide after the shit hit the fan.
    • eastbound 3y ago
      As fuming as I am, there are I think 30 attempts and 7 successes out of 100k males per year? so we still need to prove that it is above average. And above average of the median cryptocurrency owner, because they may have a risk profile too. And then, yes, trial SBF for each of them as murder on top of embezzlement.
      • enaaem 3y ago
        The problem is that financial distress is a direct cause of suicide. It’s like Sam shooting one of his clients and claim the death rate among his clients is still below the national average.
      • kelnos 3y ago
        You don't need to prove that it's above average. You need to prove that they'd still have killed themselves if SBF hadn't defrauded them. (Well, really, the opposite: you need to prove that their suicide was a direct result of SBF's fraud. And I don't think that's an impossible -- or even difficult -- bar to reach, here.)
  • fasthands9 3y ago
• nozzlegear 3y ago
  I found the variance in sentencing data on the last couple of pages interesting. Notably there’s no variances in murder sentencing listed there. Does anyone know why that is? Are judges/juries not allowed to set sentences outside the guidelines for murder trials?
• logro 3y ago
  There is nothing "median" or "average" about this crime. This is one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history.
• rgbrenner 3y ago
  FTX was one of the biggest frauds in history.. and you're showing us averages. Madoff received a 150 year sentence, and that was with leniency for pleading guilty.
  • j0hnyl 3y ago
    Propotional to the size of Madoff's ponzi, SBFs sentence is heavy.
    • tptacek 3y ago
      Both Madoff and SBF redlined the 2B1.1 "monetary amount of fraud" criteria, so the comparison is moot.
      • Breza 3y ago
        Yeah, I think the guidelines are correct to think about all staggeringly large amounts of money in the same way. If you steal $600 million, you probably would have stolen $10 billion if you could.
    • e40 3y ago
      Again, Madoff plead guilty. Has SBF shown any (real) remorse or taken responsibility?
      • Breza 3y ago
        Nope. And the sentencing includes several instances of SBF lying to the court. Judges don't like being lied to.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • dml2135 3y ago
    I don't think there's any way to reasonable describe a life sentence as lenient, unless one was facing the death penalty.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• dns_snek 3y ago
  Statistical value of a human life in the US is around $7.5 million. Stealing $10 billion is therefore statistically equivalent to killing 1300 people, or pretty close to half of 9/11. That seems like a pretty light sentence to me.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • theragra 3y ago
    Yet in 2008 crisis nobody was sentenced for more then 15 years
    • dns_snek 3y ago
      And that's was unjust, too.
  • golly_ned 3y ago
    This equivalency of cash to bodies is ghoulish. Does anyone actually think like this?
    • dns_snek 3y ago
      Well he stole $10 billion, imagine all of your friends' friends' friends' friends losing their entire life savings just before retirement. What % of these people are going to kill themselves, how many thousands of lifetimes of work did he destroy, how much stress did he cause, how many of those people are going to suffer for the rest of their lives, and how many early deaths is that going to cause, among direct victims as well as their family members? Or is it somehow more okay because they're out of sight, out of mind? There's still going to be a real body count for his actions, it just won't be immediately apparent. Yes, it's ghoulish, as were his actions, but it's too easy to handwave them away as just some techbro oopsie if they're not contextualized like this.
    • Atheros 3y ago
      When it's your job to decide which safety equipment to install on highways or whether to install scrubbers on coal power plants, you have to think like this.
• whatscooking 3y ago
  Yea let’s let fraudsters run amuck, he damaged the lives of millions of people, fuck him
  • akaike 3y ago
    Same opinion. He should rot in jail forever
  • Intralexical 3y ago
    Pithy, and concise. Sometimes we moralize too much.
• Vicinity9635 3y ago
  "AUSA Nicolas Roos: Samuel Bankman-Fried stole $8 billion dollars. It was theft, from customers spread all over the world. It was a loss that impacted people significantly and caused damage. I want to address a few of the new victim letters" "AUSA Roos: They lost their life savings. A man who lives in Portugal - the day before bankruptcy his daughter was born. He was marred by the ominous specter of financial instability and his daughter's future. Then there's the 23 year old from Morocco" "AUSA Roos: He is the eldest son. He kept money on FTX not to loan it out to the defendant but for family's security. One more - a couple in the later stages of their life, late 60s, they invested with life savings. They were depressed, they had to go back to work" https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/1773365759999127957 https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/177336575999912795...
  • Dalewyn 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • Vicinity9635 3y ago
      This wasn't a failure of investment, it was fraud.
      • Dalewyn 3y ago
        Yes, it was fraud. That is besides the point. See from your citation, emphasis mine: "AUSA Roos: He is the eldest son. He kept money on FTX not to loan it out to the defendant but for family's security. One more - a couple in the later stages of their life, late 60s, they invested with life savings. They were depressed, they had to go back to work" Savings should be handled appropriately as savings, not investments or "savings". SBF stole money, but there is a point to be made that people might also need better education on handling their own money.
        • feoren 3y ago
          You are victim-blaming. Many customers thought they were "savings accounts" that were completely distinct from the investment arm; they were deceived. SBF stole money from his "savings accounts" arm to fund his investment arm.
• 4ndrewl 3y ago
  Wasn't perjury and witness tampering significant here though? Messing with the actual justice system should end with heavy punishment I guess.
• edgyquant 3y ago
  All this proves is that murderers get off way too easy.
• runako 3y ago
  > So it should be really hard to argue that this is a "light" sentence. The well-considered federal sentencing guidelines put the sentence for this crime at over 100 years. That is, for an anonymous defendant at remove, our legal system believes that 100+ years is a fair sentence for this set of offenses. So another way of looking at this is because of who the specific defendant is here, the court shaved 80 years off the "fair" sentence. I would consider that a light sentence.
  • acdha 3y ago
    That’s starting from misunderstanding how federal sentencing works - even the prosecutors only asked for half that. Ken White has a good explainer of how federal sentencing actually works and why the numbers people toss around are too high: https://popehat.substack.com/p/beware-the-flood-of-trump-sentencing https://popehat.substack.com/p/beware-the-flood-of-trump-sen...
    • runako 3y ago
      From the article you linked: "White collar criminals only get sentenced close to the statutory maximum when (1) they are only convicted of one or two counts with very low statutory maximum (say, one count of a crime with a five-year statutory maximum, as part of a plea bargain), or (2) cases involving truly extraordinary amounts of money." Unlike the Trump case the article discusses, this case involves a truly extraordinary amount of money. Prosecutors did indeed ask for half that, but the court gave only half of the (already lenient) request due to facts about the person who was convicted. Note that the Madoff case involved a similar amount of money and he indeed did get the big sentence. I suspect that was because he was likely to die in jail given any reasonable sentence, so better to make a show of it. In this case, SBF got a more lenient treatment for a similar offense because he is younger (note that the judge did not believe he has any remorse and still gave a lighter sentence).
• philwelch 3y ago
  Ghislane Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years.
• tptacek 3y ago
  It's a light sentence by the sentencing guidelines; the judge has departed downwards from what the guidelines would seem to have recommended (we didn't get to see the PSR so we don't know which of the obvious details have been contested).
• kernal 3y ago
  >So it should be really hard to argue that this is a "light" sentence. If anything, it's excessive if you consider the nature of the crime relative to the nature of murder or kidnapping. How many people's lives were ruined or ended by his malfeasance? He got off lightly.
• hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I disagree with your assessment for all the reasons other people have said. However, the other thing I'd point out is that murder is rarely a federal crime - it's usually a state crime. I was curious as to when it becomes a federal crime and found this: https://www.greenspunlaw.com/library/when-murder-is-a-federal-crime.cfm https://www.greenspunlaw.com/library/when-murder-is-a-federa... Dollars-to-donuts that the vast majority of federal murders here were drug related. Not that I think the that makes it in any way better, but in many ways gang violence is more of a war than an individual, targeted killing. These types of circumstances matter when it comes to sentencing, and I'm not surprised at all that SBF's sentencing is longer than you "average" federal murder sentencing.
• dfxm12 3y ago
  I don't think it's a light sentence, but maybe it's not the right sentence. For the punishment to fit the crime, he shouldn't ever allowed to be rich again. I think that's more of a deterrent for this sort of thing. I say this tongue in cheek, but mostly because I don't know what options judges have at their disposal in these situations.
• sonar_un 3y ago
  The moral of the story, don't rob from rich people. If you rob from poor people, with MLM, or fraud, or money laundering, thats fine. But if you rob from the billionaires, you're being put away for life.
• ken47 3y ago
  It would be more accurate to compare this to a mass crime. 25 feels light for perpetrating one of the biggest and notorious frauds in modern history. Did the judge go to the upper range of the punishment spectrum? There are judges out there who would have made an example out of this case.
• err4nt 3y ago
  I'm not saying that people should kill others or themselves because of the amounts of money involved here, and I'm not entirely sure what the minimum threshold is for financial crimes where that becomes an (grim and unfortunate) side effect, but when we're discussing the largest fraud in history it's definitely on that scale. Even though he stole money, the human cost of that is beyond just fractured careers and relationships, undoubtedly because of how humans behave people almost certainly lost their entire lives due to the continuing effects caused only by this crime. That cost in human life should be taken into account here, even if it shouldn't have had that kind of cost.
• bufferoverflow 3y ago
  Money is not just paper with pictures on it. Money represents human labor. So him stealing billions effectively destroyed thousands of lifetimes of labor. If anything, his sentence is extremely light.
• janalsncm 3y ago
  Honestly, comparing billion dollar fraud to murder is a bit tricky for me. In the one hand we could try to give a dollar value to a life, maybe a million dollars. But I don’t know if stealing a million dollars is equivalent to murder, since money is fungible and people are not. The government can make the victim of theft whole. For murder, that is not possible. On the other hand maybe a more reasonable approach would be to treat criminals as people who need to be quarantined for as long as they’re dangerous. If we could identify a treatable disease (a tumor for example) and know with 100% certainty that treating that disease could prevent further crimes, I personally wouldn’t have an issue with it. We have an impulse to punish evil, and severely punish very evil things, but it’s more of a primitive drive than anything productive. (Of course the exception is the extent to which punishment can deter crime.)
  • Intralexical 3y ago
    > We have an impulse to punish evil, and severely punish very evil things, but it’s more of a primitive drive than anything productive. (Of course the exception is the extent to which punishment can deter crime.) That "exception" is the productive social instinct of what you call "a primitive drive". And it's not just deterrence to negate other people's existing criminal intentions. It also prevents the specific individual in question from reoffending, and it also prevents other people who worked with the criminal from effectively spreading their antisocial culture/habits to unrelated individuals who otherwise have no existing proclivities for crime. It's almost about killing the idea, even more than punishing the person. Having a standard where you're going to say "This is not okay and we absolutely won't put up with it" is vital to keeping a healthy culture where you can walk down the streets safe at night, or keep your money in a bank knowing it won't just disappear. The penalty for crimes has to be at least several times whatever the criminal gained, in order to be a viable deterrent considering the odds of getting caught, plus at least proportional to the harm inflicted, to center your societal structures on empathising and identifying with the victim. There has to be a heavy artificial cost for criminals, because otherwise game theory of the self-interested says that we'll all end up being constantly victimized. Rule of the law isn't "primitive". I also feel the desire to forgive and quarantine, but with finite empathy, it's backwards to feel for the perpetrators rather than the victims. Look at Russia for an example to see what happens when predatorily selfish behaviors are allowed to go unpunished, and inevitably end up normalized. [1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Russia --- > If we could identify a treatable disease (a tumor for example) and know with 100% certainty that treating that disease could prevent further crimes, I personally wouldn’t have an issue with it. I would consider this potentially much, much worse and more "barbaric" than imprisonment or even execution, as it would almost definitely be done unconsensually and coercibly.
• willmadden 3y ago
  Three people killed themselves after losing everything. The feds used FTX as an excuse to ramp up operation chokepoint 2.0, which left countless startups bankless. It was a light sentence.
• rmbyrro 3y ago
  Have you considered how many people committed suicide because of SBF? Or how many people won't be able to pay for medical care, will suffer, and eventually die? It's impossible to knoe the number, but it's arguably non-zero. He should have gotten the 40 years prosecution was asking.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• kelnos 3y ago
  Excessive? I don't want to put monetary value on people's lives, but I don't think it's obvious that someone murdering one person has done more wrong than another who stole billions of dollars and ruined the lives of hundreds or thousands of people. Especially if any of those people committed suicide because of what happened, but even if not.
• advisedwang 3y ago
  I haven't gone through that source in detail, but I would assume that includes people who pled guilty, felony murder (ie they didn't directly kill someone, were just involved in a different felony that resulted in someone's death), crimes of passion and other cases where lighter sentences are justified.