UCLA professor stole missile secrets for China, faces 219 years in prison | Hacker News Reader

UCLA professor stole missile secrets for China, faces 219 years in prison

newsweek.com

27 pointsrhegart17 comments

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Discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20343254

Interesting that the charges include " failed to report income generated by the scheme on his tax returns."

Certainly not the first one being caught via the tax code [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Capone#Tax_evasion

Why not 1000 years? These numbers are just stupid at this point. Just say life in prison.

Please get educated about how law works so you dont feel compelled to comment on things you obviously are not familiar with.

There is a reason why we just dont say “life in prison”.

Please don't cross into personal attack or post unsubstantive comments here. If you know more, it would be great to share some of what you know, so we can all learn something. If you don't want to do that, it's also fine not to post.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

From a non-US point of view, it is indeed a very surprising aspect of the US legal system.

Making jail time linear seems like a strange fit for finite human lives. Are there many other legal systems in the world that work like this ?

Aren't these large numbers just the sum of the maximum jail time for each of the charges? How are multiple charges handled in other countries?

Yes, in the US and most of continental Europe, multiple charges are usually first summed, then sentence determination is done by court order and then penal enforcement rules kick in after the verdict (2 years sentenced does not always mean 2 years served). A 1000 years' sentence has a greater non-parole duration than a life with parole; it is likely that he will serve life with no parole. IANAL, though.

At least in France, this article says that for similar concurrent charges (not sure how similarity is determined), the most important sentence is picked. So, max instead of sum.

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do?idArticl...

That means if a particular action is a crime under multiple articles, the most serious one is chosen. Separately committed crimes are different.

This seems odd, like buy one get one one free, but for crimes. If you murder a guy in France, you can burn his house down without additional penalty?

I am quite certain you can.

Well in Finland you get a discount if you have committed crimes before.

There are cases when a person had raped someone and during a leave from the jail he had raped an other victim. The jail term for the second offence is less than usual due to the first sentence still not being fulfilled.

The years demonstrate the amount and magnitude of the errors. If a punishment was life in prison, and the person had done two of those, that’s two life sentences. For example, if someone was facing 519 years for the same crimes as above professor, it would indicate the amount of which they have been accused of. A person can commit much more crime than a remaining lifetime worth(75 years realistic max)of imprisonment time. Similar to el chapo being charged more than a sicario, even though the sicario would have most likely done things that if convicted also warrant life in prison.

This matters because some convictions might be overturnedon appeal.

These numbers in headlines are frequently overblown: https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...

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