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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

That was a pretty wild story, but honestly what disturbed me the most was right near the beginning:

> one count of false statement to a National Credit Union Administration insured institution — punishable by up to 30 years in federal prison — and one count of aggravated identity theft — punishable by up to two years in federal prison.

So you get 30 years for lying to a bank, but only two years for stealing someone's identity for decades, resulting in the real person being involuntarily committed to a mental institution just for insisting they are who they actually are?

It should be the other way around. Two years for the lie, 30 years for the identity theft.

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That's because "aggravated identity theft" can never be the only crime you are convicted for. It is always dependent on another felony. The identity theft just adds two years on-top of whatever the other crime would've gotten you.

Here, of course the two extra years don't matter, but if you commit identity theft to steal your grandma's candies, I don't think you should be getting 30 years in prison.

Relevant: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1028A

It wasn’t just any bank, it was a bank insured by the U.S. government. The U.S. government does not take being lied to lightly.

By the way, anyone who has applied for a mortgage in the U.S. has seen many, many warnings about how lying on a mortgage application is a federal crime that carries very serious penalties.

you have it backwards, this is just how the federal government establishes jurisdiction over things it can otherwise not constitutionally regulate, but wishes to.

if you can't think of which specific clause of the constitution allows for that law, it is either comes from financial rails that the federal government extended outwards, or interstate commerce.

It might come from:

“To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;”

U.S. Const. Art. I, Sec. 8.

If a mortgage is a security in this context. But I don’t know for sure. Usually the answer is the Commerce Clause.

What strikes me here is that they get thirty years for this at all. What he did was absolutely horrible, but a thirty year sentence seems excessive. That's, as I understand it, more than other countries give you for murder. This was a non-violent (albeit terrible) crime.

> He was indicted Dec. 12, on five counts of false statement to a National Credit Union Administration insured institution and two counts of aggravated identity theft.

5 charges for a total of 30 years, so 6 years max per charge. Much more reasonable than 30 for a single one.

Did you not read the very next sentence?

> He pleaded guilty Monday to one count of each charge, and the other counts were dropped.

The max sentences in the lede are explicitly identified as being for one count of each, and that's all he was convicted of.

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