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Suppose I toss a brick through the window of a government office overnight when no one is inside, causing $101 worth of damage. I could be charged with felony destruction of government property, a crime with the statute says has a maximum sentence of 10 years and a $250k find.

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...

[2] http://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/

Your 6-7 years is 'probably'. PEOPLE DO GET MAXIMUM. It happens. Therefore you saying it doesn't won't change anything. Your equating low probability with no probability. This is a false equation.

Have some intellectual honesty and admit you were wrong.

Did you read the link? See popehat [0] as well. The prosecutors said he should get the 6 or 7 years. And, if the judge went crazy and ignored the guidelines, this is what appeals are for. You seem to be the one lacking intellectual honesty here!

0. https://www.popehat.com/2013/03/24/three-things-you-may-not-...

>0% != 0%

There's no way to know it as a fact because the judge is legally allowed to apply any sentence up to that maximum. His link shows that most judges follow the guidelines, and vary rarely go over them. Intelligent decisions are ones that are made after understanding probabilities. Unfortunately Aaron decided to take the guaranteed outcome of suicide over the small chance that he'd serve multiple decades. I think we all can agree that that was not the right choice.

We see this sort of "up to" crap all the time in our culture. It's still misleading. Accurate, but fundamentally misleading and wrong.

So you are saying: Judges never convict people to the maximum sentence? I'm sorry, your point isn't very clear. It's a bit muddled.

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.

I don't think they're saying never. If you look at the recommended guidelines[1], for a crime like Schwartz's the maximum could theoretically be many years, but the guidelines would suggest a sentence between 0 and a few years (he'd be in the first column assuming he didn't have any criminal history. Depending on what modifiers come into play his "offense level" could be as low as 6[2]. Maybe it would be more than that, but he certainly wouldn't hit level 40, which is what it would take to get a 30+ years sentence. Even though a judge can technically give a higher sentence than the guidelines, it's fairly rare— it happened less than 3% of the time in 2017.[3]

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...

Remember the original comment only said that people plea because of the big threat. It is a big threat. And given the fact that you probably wouldn't take a 1:33 chance on Russian roulette, it seem it is a big threat to you.

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.

The 3% who were sentenced above the guideline amount were not chosen at random. They were people who had specific factors in their cases that allowed for an above guideline sentence.

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%.

Ah tzs again. Let me quote you:

"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.

>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.

Read the other apologists. They quote a 3% deviation from sentencing guidelines.

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%.

> Read the other apologists. They quote a 3% deviation from sentencing guidelines

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.

I literally said the exact opposite of what you claim I said. Sometimes when I get riled up online it's helpful to take some deep breaths and come back to it later.

We know his own lawyer said that he was unlikely to get more than a couple years, and was plausibly looking at a non-custodial sentence even if convicted.

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.