Here's a live tweeting of the sentencing hearing; some of Judge Kaplan's remarks are really interesting.
https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/177334004374401064...
Sam Bankman Fried stole billions of dollars [1], probably often around $1000 at a time from tens of thousands of people. If going with my logic, he should be getting a lot longer than 25 years, upwards of hundreds or thousands of years. Obviously, it's not a linear relationship, the crime was non-violent, first-time-offender, etc. I'm just saying that 25 years seems pretty fair to me considering the magnitude of the crime.
I am one of the victims (well, of Gemini Earn anyway), and I think if I were given the choice, I'd probably sentence him to 20-25 years.
[1] Or at least so grossly mismanaged that there's no real purpose in drawing a distinction.
Almost definitely not, especially if it was your first crime. It’s pretty unlikely you’d even be caught.
Severity of the punishment has extremely diminishing returns on discouraging future crimes. The only other impetus for a longer sentence is if you think the defendant is likely to commit more crimes when released. Besides that, longer sentences are hard to justify.
The three purposes of punishment are retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence. Him getting 25 years isn't undeserved.
Prison is not and shouldn't be about rehabilitation. It's society that requires to be less exposed to SBF, by 20-25 years.
If I stole exactly one empty car exactly one time, then yes, I'd be a first time offender in the sense everyone thinks it. If I stole a thousand empty cars, and only got caught after the 999th, then sure, legally I'd be a "first time offender", but I would have still committed the crime a thousand times.
This wasn't a one-time clerical error that he failed to report. This was an intentional bit of theft that kept going for years. It's really not a "first time offense", and I don't think it's fair to categorize it as such.
"Habitual offender" has an actual legal definition in most countries that does not align with your views.
On that subject: The Russians seem to have leaked videos of the accused ISIS terrorists being tortured: "Though the goriest clips were not shown on state television, the brutal treatment of the defendants was made clear. And the decision by the Russian authorities to showcase it so publicly in court, in a way they had almost never done before, was intended as a sign of revenge and a warning to potential terrorists, analysts said." [0]
Will it work? Doubtful, because:
1. We should never underestimate the human susceptibility to overconfidence — and to rationalizing away warnings from past experience: "Well, when I do it, I won't make their mistakes." (Cf. the first chapter of The Right Stuff, describing several episodes in which a military test pilot gets killed in a crash; with each fatal crash, the dead pilot's colleagues think, How could he have been so stupid? I'd have never done [fill in action]. Yeah, right ....)
2. Plus: That sort of thing just motivates the real fanatics to escalate the cycle of revenge and punishment. (I'm rereading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August; she describes how WWI started out in somewhat the same way.)
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/world/europe/russia-terro...
There was a quote something like "We don't lock our doors because we are afraid of people stealing, we lock our doors because it is an easy way to take away the temptation to steal from a lot of people who would otherwise be honest"
Very good book and it showed via study that there is some threshold where at one point more people would be dishonest. It there would be completely no punishment for any stealing (even if non-voilent) I'm pretty sure more people would consider stealing.
TLDR; the idea of a punishment is not to completely prevent such behavior in the future in society but to reduce such behavior across whole society.
That said, I also have no reason to think that if he's not locked away, he won't just do the same or similar scam again. He hasn't shown any remorse, and he just pretends to be ignorant of all the crimes. If not put into jail, I suspect he'd just go to a country with difficult extradition laws and do some other cryptocurrency scam from there. Putting him in jail for 20 years at least avoids it for 20 years.
First, that punishment has three purposes – retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence – does not entail that each of these purposes must be realized in a given act of punishment in order for that act to be morally legitimate. For example, we may justly imprison a recidivist thief even if we know from experience that he is extremely unlikely to change his ways as a result of his imprisonment and even if circumstances make it unlikely that his particular imprisonment will deter other thieves. Similarly, the fact that a given act of capital punishment may not fulfill all of the ends of punishment does not by itself suffice to make that act morally illegitimate.
Second, while there is obviously a sense in which capital punishment can prevent rehabilitation, there is also a sense in which it actually facilitates rehabilitation. How so? Consider first that a wrongdoer cannot truly be rehabilitated until he comes to acknowledge the gravity of his offense. But the gravity of an offense is more manifest when the punishments for that offense reflect its gravity – that is to say, when the principle of proportionality is respected. A society in which armed robbery was regularly punished with at most a small fine would be a society in which armed robbers would have greater difficulty coming to see the seriousness of their crimes, and in which they would for that reason be less likely to be rehabilitated. Similarly, a society in which even the most sadistic serial murderers are given the same punishments as bank robbers is going to be a society in which sadistic serial murderers will have greater difficulty in coming to see the seriousness of their crimes, and thus will be less likely to be rehabilitated.
I should clarify. I think punishment mostly makes the punishee angry with the punisher. I don't think that they generally feel like they are paying their penance. If they didn't already think that what they were doing is wrong, I really don't see how they are going to suddenly start just because they were punished.
I generally think that the way that Scandinavia does prisons is better. I think that punishing people specifically with the intent of making their life worse is viscerally satisfying (the retribution part of that quote), but I think it's not actually a good thing to organize a society around increasing suffering. The US has a higher murder rate than Western European countries, despite having stricter punishments, including the death penalty. There can be thousands of factors that influence that, obviously, but it doesn't seem to be massively deterring crime.
I think prisons are basically a necessary evil; there are certain people that are antithetical to a functioning society, and so it's probably better to separate them from most people. I think the point should be, though, to not view these things as "punishment" but more "a chance at reformation".
Prisons in the US used to have college education programs, and job training programs, so that when you left you had a means of supporting yourself that wasn't criminal. If I understand correctly, this is still the case in Sweden, and I think that's a good idea.
Now of course, there are humans that are so warped that really no amount of job training is going to help them (e.g. a Jeffrey Dahmer), and at that point you really do just need to treat it like punishment.
I'm not going to say it's impossible, maybe he could be managing this big crypto empire from jail, but it would certainly be harder to do all that from prison.
For the “isolation from society” i think it’s the least compelling part of lengthy incarceration. You can probably achieve the same effect with just house arrest and other such restrictions
He probably is a higher risk of racking up 25 more years every 18 months than a shank specialist.
People like Sam Bankman Fried are much harder for me to feel bad over. He was never struggling to pay rent or having to worry about not being able to afford groceries next month. He was already well off, and just decided to gamble with other (poorer) people's money because he wanted more money.
This means, to me, that this was a more cold and calculated thing, not something out of desperation or frustration, just greed. Robbing someone that you think is rich is bad. Robbing someone you think is poor is something supervillains do. If he's already been able to square that circle once, I see no reason that he wouldn't be able to do it again.
Forgive me for not crying over how he might actually have to pay consequences for his actions.
I think there is probably a significant number of people who wouldn't normally be criminals, and thus aren't technically being "deterred", but would end up being just that little bit less scrupulous if they regularly see prominent examples of criminal behavior going unpunished.
Really, my preferred punishment for him would be a sentence of 25 years working in a non-managerial, non-ownership hourly position in the quick-service restaurant or janitorial fields, earning not more than the Federal minimum.
i think you missed the whole "justice" point there.
spending 25 year behind bars with 21+ yrs mandatory seems like enough to deter most people.
I'm not sure that's a sufficiently bad outcome to deter the next crypto narcissist.
Punishment has three purposes, namely, retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence.
I also don't know how much rehabilitation actually occurs in our prisons. From what I understand, not much.
citation needed
Apparently that logic applied to Bernie Madoff. He got 150 years. How are these cases so similar and yet got radically different sentences?
Partially in that SBF's victims will get "100%" back, based on the USD value of their holdings at the time.
Madoff victims, especially the wealthily got a large haircut on their holdings and clawbacks on money they had taken out as far as 5 years back from sentencing.
Also Maddoff's fraud went on for 15+ years, SBF's was maybe a year to 18 months at the most?
These two cases are so widely different that you can't really compare them except at a superficial level, ie they were both fraud, and that's about where the similarities end.
I have to disagree on that. Mostly because the order of magnitude of both scams is the same (billions) and both destroyed how many lives?
And sure, maybe FTX victims will get 100% back, but when? How long until you see that money back?
SBF's system was to use clients' money to do illiquid investments. Was it fraud? YES, because he lied to his clients and said he didn't invest their money. And that's why he was tried and punished. But was it the same kind of fraud as Madoff? NO.
In law, intent is everything. If you kill someone by accident, or in self-defense, or after planning their murder for years, the law will treat that very differently; yet in all cases the result is the same (the person is dead).
Same with fraud. It's not the same if it's a pure fraud where there is no possibility that the victims will ever see their money back, or if it's a fraud where it's possible they will be made whole, even if that possibility only exists in the mind of the perpetrator, because the mind of the perpetrator is what the legal system is interested in.
The owners, the police, the prosecutor and the jury would be far more interested in the breaking and entry charge than the $1000.
In fact, in every state of the Union, if you're facing me whilst committing the act of trespassing inside my home, I can legally punch a hole through your torso with a 9mm.
We are seeing this kind of crime on a regular basis in our neighborhood. The cops have pretty much given up. They also mentioned that even if they make an arrest, the bail is set so low, these guys would be out quickly. Overall, my impression is there is zero deterrence for these kind of crimes here (a pretty affluent neighborhood in one of the tech cities in the west coast)
SBF was an outsider who stole from these people.
On 8 March 2024, Hernández was convicted of three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy and faces mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years in prison.