I assume whomever downvoted You has forgotten what happened to Aaron Schwartz.
> The high conviction rate is a result of extremely high maximum sentences. People who are 100% innocent often plead guilty after being threatened with a 30-year prison sentence that would be only 1 or 2 years under local law.
That's erroneous because very few federal defendants actually face such long sentences, so those that do so pleading guilty is not a plausible explanation for high conviction rates.
Federal sentences for a particular instance of a crime are based on the class of the crime and on the details of the particular instance. The class sets an upper limit, which often is long, up to 20 years, but it is the details that determine how much you can actually get. To actually get anywhere near that 20 years you have to have a lot of the details against you. Typically this means you caused a lot of damages or harm, had multiple prior convictions for similar crimes, where doing it as part of organized crime, and similar things.
Swartz is a good example. A lot of reporting said he faced 30 years or 50 years or similar big numbers. Actually, he was looking at maybe 6 or 7 years if things went as favorably as possible for prosecutors.
The DOJ bears a lot of the blame for that bad reporting. They make no attempt in the press releases announcing indictments to actually compute the maximum sentence for the particular instance of the crime. They just give the maximum that it is possible for the worst possible instance of that crime committed by the worst possible defendant.
Here's a good article on federal sentence length [1].
[1] https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
Do you know this for a fact?
Because the way I understand it is, he was facing multiple decades in prison IF all charges stuck. And once you got to trial, all charges can stick. It has happened. So he was facing 35 years. So saying he wasn't is just wrong.
Your 6-7 years is 'probably'.
I think what your saying is: The federal government doesn't threaten you with 35 years, they threaten you with 10x3.5 years, and since it is possible that not all 10 will stick... it's not really a 35 year threat?
I mean, if I threaten to punch you 10 times but I might stop at 1,2,3 or any number and I probably won't get to 10, but we can negotiate before I start, is it not a 10 punch threat?
To me it seems like you are splitting hairs in order to defend the indefensible. The practice of tacking on as many charges to get people to plea bargain is unethical and fascist.
Am I facing 10 years in prison? No! That's because the way sentencing works under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines is that the sentence range is looked up in a table whose rows range from short sentences up to the maximum (10 years in this case). The biggest factor in that lookup is how much monetary damage I caused. At $101 I'm going go get a row with a sentencing range that is something like up to a year or so.
To push it up to where my sentencing row actually includes 10 years I'd have to have done a lot more damage, such as blown up the building.
(There are other factors that also go into picking the row, such as if I have prior convictions for similar crimes).
When I'm indicted, though, the DOJ press release will tout that I've been charged with a crime with up to 10 years and $250k fines as penalties. They'd say the same thing when indicting someone who blew up the whole building. Their press releases make no attempt to convey the sentence the person is actually facing based on the facts the DOJ is alleging about that person's alleged crime.
In the case of someone charged with multiple crimes there is another factor that leads to inflated numbers. The same underlying acts can often support more than one charge. Similar crimes are grouped together for sentencing under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, and if you are charged with and convicted of more than one crime from the same group based on the same underlying acts, you are only sentenced for one of them.
Unfortunately, this grouping is often ignored in press releases and reporting about potential sentencing.
In most cases, those multi-decade numbers you see people talk are due to one or both of the aforementioned issues: (1) not taking into account what the person is actually alleged to have done, and (2) ignoring grouping if the person is charged with more than one thing.
Here is a detailed analysis of Swartz's possible sentencing [1]. The earlier article by the same author looking at what he was charged with is also interesting [2].
[1] http://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-aa...
Have some intellectual honesty and admit you were wrong.
0. https://www.popehat.com/2013/03/24/three-things-you-may-not-...
We see this sort of "up to" crap all the time in our culture. It's still misleading. Accurate, but fundamentally misleading and wrong.
Or are you saying that his probably of being sentenced to the maximum was low? If so, how low? And when does it stop being 'intelligent' to consider a small probability with a horribly outcome? I mean, in your intelligent opinion.
depending [1]: https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/guidelines-manu... [2]: See §2B1.1 at https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines/2018-guidelines-manual/2018-... [3]: Table 8 at https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
But not when it is on others. Then it's fine 'because low probability'. In fact, many of the apologists for what happened go as far as to conflate in a single post low probability with no probability.
The double think is amazing.
These are factors such as causing a death, causing significant physical injury, causing extreme psychological harm to your victims beyond that one would expect from the crime, abducting people, causing property damage beyond what is taken into account by the guidelines, using weapons during the crime, or torture.
Swartz did not have any of the factors that could end one up in the 3%.
"lot of reporting said he faced 30 years... Actually, he was looking at maybe 6 or 7 years if things went as favorably as possible for prosecutors."
So let me ask again, last time you didn't answer: Is the chance of a 35 year sentence for Aaron 0%?
No? Then do the intellectually honest thing and admit you are wrong. Your correcting somebody by saying wrong things. And then doubling down on it.
Low probability is not 0%. Whatever the probability was, it was real that they could have given him 30 years. Unlikely? Yeah. But I'll bet you wouldn't play Russian roulette at those odds; whatever they may be.
But that's the question. The probability is not 0%. It may be %0.01, or %0.001. Can either of us find any existing cases where a defendant with Aaron's background received a 33-level sentence increase? I would propose that that has never happened in cases with similar circumstances to Aaron's. If you can find one, I'd be interested in the citation.
In the absence of any examples, my argument is that the chance of a 35 year sentence is not functionally different from 0%, and Aaron (and any other defendant in this situation) should have made decisions based on the 99% of sentences they were actually likely to receive.
One last note: you mentioned playing Russian Roulette at those odds. Russian Roulette normally has a 16% chance of death. I wouldn't play RR at 16% odds. Would I play it a 0.001% odds? Probably, presuming the benefits of playing RR were of significant value to me.
Aaron's chance of a 35 year sentence was not 16%. It was also not 0.0%. It's somewhere in-between, and unless you have evidence that shows otherwise, I'd personally guess it was below 0.01%, and his choice of suicide remains a tragic one. YMMV.
Sentencing guidelines for Aaron were 6-7 years. A single wire charge on max penalty could be 20. All you need is one judge who saw WarGames to want to make an example out of the kid.
I don't know what the probability is. You don't either. Likely no one did. But that probably has weight.
It's disturbing: the callous indifference to that weight by those who question the exact kilos from an arm chair expert point of view.
This whole thing has parallels to other situations:
A Powerful Group is responsible for a system that perpetrated an injustice.
Members of the powerful group are confronted with the injustice. Members have the following reactions:
Denial (high dissonance)
Disgust
Apologists
Apologists do the same thing: They minimize, deny, question and speculate.
What apologists of all kinds don't realize is that even if they are right, they are wrong.
The callous indifference shown, instead of the guttural understanding of something wrong being needed to be made right... is what is so hard to understand. Even if your argument that the official numbers are overblown by x%.
In any given year, around 4% of women in the US will get pregnant. Suppose Alice is a sexually active woman in the US who uses the pill religiously, and who requires her sex partners to wear condoms.
Do you think that because 4% of women will get pregnant this year, and Alice is a women, Alice has a 4% chance of getting pregnant?
That's the kind of reasoning you are using with the 3% figure for upward deviations in sentencing. You are assuming that because 3% of sentences are above guidelines, everyone who is sentenced is equally at risk for an above guideline sentence.
> Sentencing guidelines for Aaron were 6-7 years. A single wire charge on max penalty could be 20. All you need is one judge who saw WarGames to want to make an example out of the kid.
A judge cannot just arbitrarily exceed the guidelines like that. There are specific factors and considerations that a judge must cite to justify an upward deviation, and they are not applicable in Swartz's case. A judge who just arbitrarily decided to apply his own criteria to come up with 20 years would have that quickly overturned on appeal as an abuse of discretion.
You want to know what happens to someone in Swartz's situation if he gets a judge that wants to throw the book at him? He gets 7 years. That's the result of a hard line judge accepting an exaggerated damages claim and not applying any of the factors that would allow lowering the sentence. That's why his lawyers, the prosecutors, and outside lawyers all said he would probably actually get at most a few months--the 7 year number is the "judge who saw WarGames to want to make an example out of the kid" number.
We also know that the absurd sentences you're referring to would be departures from the federal sentencing guidelines, which spell out where in the range of possible sentences each specific case lands.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/02/21/us.scotus.toxic.love/ind...