5 ms·
He wasn't facing 35 years of time. His lawyer did not just fall off the turnip truck and knew how federal sentencing guidelines worked.
by danielweber 13y ago
He wasn't facing 35 years of time. His lawyer did not just fall off the turnip truck and knew how federal sentencing guidelines worked.
- adestefan 13y agoIt's also the journalists, too. Anytime you see a story about someone's punishment for the crime and it includes the words "cumulative" or "up to" you know all they did was start adding up random numbers from every little charge. Sentencing doesn't work that way and at that point you need to just ignore the story.
- DEinspanjer 13y agoI'd be willing to accept your statement at face value. Are there any good indicators for laymen what likely punishments he would have been facing if he would have continued to trial and lost? What sort of crimes typically have similar actual and enforced punishments? I'm wondering where on the scale it gets slotted. Is it between assault and shoplifting or grand theft and kidnapping?
- girvo 13y agoSetencing is hard. Prosecutors have the incentive to put as many charges on them as possible, to get a guilty plea, but not all of them make it through, so it's hard to know what is going to happen until the defendant goes to trial. This goes for all sorts of crimes (most of them, in fact).
- dragonwriter 13y ago> Are there any good indicators for laymen what likely punishments he would have been facing if he would have continued to trial and lost? For federal crimes, sentencing is generally governed by the federal sentencing guidelines. [1] The application is conceptually simple -- there are guidelines for determining the offense level for each base crime, guidelines for grouping offenses (some of which just keep the most serious, some of which start with the most serious and increase based on other offenses), and guidelines for adjustments to the offense level for various factors such as actual harms inflicted, the defendants criminal history, the defendants acceptance of responsibility, and so forth, and finally guidelines to translate offense level into sentence. But the details are quite involved. Perhaps the most important thing to note, in the federal guidelines, is that in most cases, where multiple convictions are handed down for offenses involve the same victim and the same act or transaction, or different acts or transaction as part of the same plan or scheme, the offense level is set by the single most serious count alone -- charging multiple counts of the same charge basically just increase the chance of getting a conviction. For state offenses, sentencing is handled by state-specific rules. [1] http://www.ussc.gov/Guidelines/2013_Guidelines/index.cfm http://www.ussc.gov/Guidelines/2013_Guidelines/index.cfm
- coldtea 13y agoPeople have gone to jail for 35 years (or life) for far less -- especially if they are targeted minorities. So let's not use the "it was just to pressure him" defense.
- danielweber 13y agoIf we are bringing up totally unrelated things, sure. Why not say he was facing a firing squad?
- coldtea 13y agoWhat exactly is "unrelated"? Restating: people, in the same country as Aaron, have been sentenced to same or worse sentences, even for lighter stuff.
- rayiner 13y agoI can't even begin to fathom what you could be talking about, unless you're talking about some "three strikes" circumstance, which is in fact unrelated because Aaron didn't have two strikes.
- coldtea 13y agoWell, he was charged with over nine felony counts. So how is that unrelated to the "three strikes" cases? Plus, the Obama administration raised maximum sentences for hacking count to 20 years (up from 10).
- smm2000 13y agoThree strikes all have to be separate convictions. Stealing one gallon of milk from three different stores is not three strikes.
- davvolun 13y agoSo stealing three gallons total? I guess I'm not clear here. The idea is that I steal a gallon of milk, am convicted, punished, then three months later steal another gallon, repeat, and the third time (three more months later) I potentially face the three strikes rule, right? (Ignoring that stealing milk probably doesn't trigger the three-strikes rule being non-violent; also the 'three months' is just to suggest "some time has passed since conviction").
- RyanMcGreal 13y agoWrong, wrong, wrong. The only way he didn't face 35 years of prison time is if he was prepared to plea guilty despite believing firmly and with sound reason that he was not a criminal. As I've argued elsewhere [1], "A prosecutor forcing someone to admit guilt by threatening a life-destroying cruel and unusual punishment if they do not admit it - why, that is the very essence of using torture to extract a confession!" [1] http://quandyfactory.com/blog/103 http://quandyfactory.com/blog/103
- rayiner 13y agoWrong, wrong, wrong. Many of the counts would have been grouped under the guidelines.
- danielweber 13y agoEven if he went to trial and lost on absolutely every charge, he was not facing 35 years. Not even 10 years, or 5 years.
- tptacek 13y agoNo, this is not in fact how it worked. Swartz's own lawyer wrote up the range of possible sentences presuming Swartz refused to plead out, ranging from "no custodial sentence at all" (his lawyer's own expectation) to 7 years on the outside, if the prosecutors carried out all their threats and the court sided with them entirely and Swartz had been convicted on all counts. Once again: Swartz's own lawyer wrote that he believed it unlikely that Swartz would do any time in prison even if he was convicted after pleading not guilty. The "35 years" thing is entirely fictional. Popehat has a fantastic blog post on why this fiction exists and how it is misunderstood.
- wglb 13y agoBut the one thing that I think was the hardest for him to accept was to be classified as a felon.