AMD stock inside trader in fight over cash gains | Hacker News Reader

AMD stock inside trader in fight over cash gains

computerworlduk.com

12 pointsNetadmin4 comments

It seems like a linear argument isn't valid here. It shouldn't be X years for Y dollars. Once you rob enough to steal away someone's retirement (As cypherpunks2 alludes elsewhere) it is hard to justify leniency. That said, taken to extremes, it's easy to argue that someone who stole 10 billion deserves worse than someone who stole a million.

Dealbreaker looks at the sparse empirical evidence, and their chart suggests a logarithmic function exists. http://dealbreaker.com/2011/09/how-much-time-in-jail-will-a-...

The one problem with it being so clear, is criminals take a cost-benefit analysis, and I'd really like all the white collar criminals to think, "Even if there isn't an obvious victim, I am likely to go bankrupt and spend the rest of my life in jail."

>>The amount he gained is important because it will vastly affect his sentence. The figure given by the prosecution could lead to a more than 20 year jail sentence, which Rajaratnam’s lawyers have already described as being effectively a “death sentence” for the trader.<<

He should not have done the crime then.

He should be sentenced for the crime he committed. If he stole $7MM, he shouldn't be punished for stealing $70MM.

He stole $7-$70 million. That's depriving 7-140 people of their retirements. A life sentence for that is perfectly reasonable. We have a broken political system where money controls politics, and so many white collar crimes have minimal punishments.

People go to prison for 15 years for stealing $100. He did 70,000-700,000 times as much damage. Copyright violators face years in prison too, for doing a fraction of even that.

Whatever sentence he gets, I really don't feel like it's a miscarriage of justice. Hussein, Kim Jong Il, Hitler, Khan, and a swarm of others broke no laws because they controlled the laws of their countries. Yet punishing them for their crimes was not a miscarriage of justice. I'm not claiming his crimes are anywhere near the same order of magnitude -- stealing is much less than murder, and even 140 people is less than millions -- but the principle is the same. If a group of people creates unjust laws, and commits crimes legal under those laws, they deserve punishment proportional to the crime, not the laws.

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