Judge acquits Backpage co-founder Michael Lacey on most counts | Hacker News Reader

Judge acquits Backpage co-founder Michael Lacey on most counts

reason.com

228 pointsperihelions197 comments

"And on June 17, Lacey is scheduled to be sentenced on the one count—international concealment of money laundering—on which the jury found him guilty. It comes with a possible sentence of up to 20 years in federal prison. Lacey plans to appeal his conviction on this count, and there seems like a good chance it will be successful, since the money he allegedly "concealed" was reported to the federal government with all the proper paperwork. But he could still face prison time as that appeals process plays out."

How was he found guilty of concealed money when he reported it to begin with? Then could still serve prison time for it.

And how is it money laundering if it turned out the money wasn't proceeds of crime.

I spent a few minutes trying to figure that out, but Reason is incredibly slanted, they just link to some even nuttier site, and even starting with news I couldn't find specifics of the one count he was convicted on.

But I'd be a little skeptical of Reason's handwave "properly reported to the government". Reported on taxes? To SEC? As part of disclosure for this trial?

One way it could be money laundering without being proceeds of a crime is if he took $1M from Pablo Escobar for a huge advertising commit and then refunded $900k to Able Paleo Bars, LLC for unused ad spend.

What is this "nuttier" site you're talking about? Do you mean https://frontpageconfidential.com/aboutfpc/ , the site run by Lacey and Larkin and their fellow journalists, in order to defend themselves?

Reason is not slanted. It's a very libertarian site and a lot of people come from the left.

>X is not slanted. It's a <specific slant being described>.

I meant like say brieghbart is, it's a conservative source. I've never known of reason to be such thing though.

All news media has a bias, it's literally impossible to serve a finite news set and not exert some editorial control. However, if you describe a news site as (very political ideology) I think it's fair to consider it slanted.

While that is philosophically true, but this thread is illustrating why that isn't a helpful perspective . Consider a media organisation has a bias towards accurate reporting with a view to helping readers achieve the best outcome for themselves and good outcomes for society. We could correctly call such an organisation "slanted", but it is missing the point that there some slants are privileged by virtue of leading the reader to act in a reasonable and rational manner while others don't.

I'm not sure if the US - or the world - has any of those. But the generic "there is a slant" point is useless. What matters is what the slant leads people to do, what information the slant is omitting and whether said slant is a good one on balance. If calling a media organisations "slanted" doesn't imply "slanted [in a way I think is potentially bad and relevant]" then the word is useless and shouldn't be used.

> Consider a media organisation has a bias towards accurate reporting with a view to helping readers achieve the best outcome for themselves and good outcomes for society.

I think you'll find that literally every media organisations thinks it's doing exactly that — the issue is that people have _wildly_ different conceits of what "best outcome" for them is.

The correspondences revealed in Fox News court cases do not paint a picture of a company with their own principled view to having a positive impact, that included respect for facts.

All companies "serve" their customers, including news organizations, and inevitably have subjective ways of organizing their efforts.

But there is a big difference between ones that have a mission geared to a positive society outcome, a commitment to customer well being, and respect for facts, with profits following from that service, vs. a mission to print whatever they can legally afford to, to maximize profits. And of course, that difference is a continuum.

Some companies take value creation seriously. Others optimize for opportunities to extract value and prey on dysfunction.

They might believe it but anyone not engaging in motivated reasoning can see they aren't. But it just isn't reasonably possible to match up major news reporting with someone who sat down and asked "what reporting is important and helpful to the readers?" outside maybe financial journals. They're pretty obviously trying to gin up hate, fear and misunderstanding. The reporting on Trump alone during his presidency was jaw dropping, let alone all the low-level warmongering that threads through the corporate press.

My rule of thumb is to go read what any politician actually said, because I've only seen it reported accurately by a journalist in rare cases. That rule simply isn't something a productive reporting slant would require.

> Consider a media organisation has a bias towards accurate reporting with a view to helping readers achieve the best outcome for themselves and good outcomes for society.

Are there media organizations that don't believe they are doing this?

“libertarian” is as much of a slant as left or right is; that its largely orthogonal to the left/right axis, and lots of people think only in terms of that axis (on which Reason is clearly on the right, but not as far from center on that axis as it is on the libertarian one) doesn't change that.

There's about a 50/50 split in the libertarian party so it really isn't. Actually, I would say most of the people there lean left, or center.

I don’t think you understood their comment as yours doesn’t seem to make sense as a response. They’re saying that libertarian can be left/right but Reason in particular skews right.

Oh, come on. Face it: The US Libertarian party has been totally been taken over by far right wing racist populist LINO assholes who like to snort coke and bang underage hookers and are embarrassed to call themselves Republican but always vote that way just to stay in power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Gaetz

>Gaetz has self-identified as a "libertarian populist".[102] Observers have described his views as far right.[2] Gaetz was an early supporter of Donald Trump and his appeal to the Republican Party base, echoing his talking points. In several commercials during his 2016 congressional campaign, Gaetz promised to "kill Muslim terrorists and build the wall".[103]

Trouble for Matt Gaetz: Witness Says She Was Paid for Sex Parties With Him:

https://newrepublic.com/post/179070/matt-gaetz-witness-house...

>The House Ethics Committee is now weighing that evidence to determine whether or not the MAGA politician paid for sex with women and an underage teenager.

The only three things libertarians care about:

1) Taxation is theft

2) Legalize weed

3) The age of consent should be lower

Media Bias Fact Check ranks Reason as a "Right-Center" biased website with a "High" rating for factual reporting: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/reason/

They certainly approach stories with an editorial perspective, but they're generally factually reliable and hardly "incredibly slanted".

Reason’s libertarian bias sits outside the mainstream Left-Right axis of US political discourse.

So what looks centrist or right leaning on a 2D scale is actually heavily biased in a different political direction.

I don't think there's much Left in US politics, unless you mean in the language of US politics, where somehow Democrats are considered "Left".

Party stances are always going to reflect the country they operate in.

On an absolute scale Republican’s support for expanding Medicare drug coverage was left leaning compared to at the time current law even though it’s to the right of many countries and Democrat’s stance on the issue.

yeah, the left/right dichotomy is gradually becoming outright meaningless - usually just sloppily slapped labels that fit an agenda. Important nuances go completely unnoticed in the left/right universe, like libertarians siding with communists, and neocons siding with democrats - or whoever thinks regime changing from above is a good idea. Anarchism, militarism, libertarianism, conservativism, fascism, welfarestateism, social democracy, etc, these are all useful terms. Left and right; not so much.

The Left-Right bias is more clear when you look at the general population vs specific interest groups.

Voters in low population states have outsized political power and therefore get handouts. Same deal with elderly voters because they vote more often and everyone expects to get old Meanwhile groups who vote less often like 18-24 year olds get fucked over.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/voter-turnout-rate-by-age...

Detailed data on 2022: https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/number-of-individu...

In Nebraska 14% of 18-24 year olds voted vs 63% of 60+ year olds. Wow I wonder who elected officials pay attention to.

The Left no longer means pushing for worker unionization or trying to expand welfare programs, at least not in the rich countries. This traditional left has become fringe almost everywhere in the top 20 economies.

The Left is now a mostly academic movement dealing in obscure words.

>The Left no longer means pushing for worker unionization or trying to expand welfare programs, at least not in the rich countries. [...] The Left is now a mostly academic movement dealing in obscure words.

This is as factual as rain is dry.

>This traditional left has become fringe almost everywhere in the top 20 economies.

What is traditional left? Marxism-Leninism? Socialism is and has been a wide spectrum since before the Russian revolution. Right now we're seeing an uptick in extreme right tendencies in Europe but top 20 economy countries such as the UK, France, Brazil and Germany do have solid leftist parties.

The traditional left advocates for the rights of those who work for a living via collective action and organizing of working people, and attempts to break up concentrations of corporate power.

That’s hardly the only things traditional left advocated for, they also wanted things unions could help provide like safer working conditions, vacation days, etc.

Initially it was an offshoot of the abolitionist movement which took a hard look at property rights in a broader context but very much still wanted to abolish slavery and even serfdom. They also wanted social security style safety nets with pensions and compensation for injured workers and their families etc. Western democracies essentially adopted most of those standards to the point where they became invisible in modern politics.

FDR for example really gutted the socialist movement in the US with the “New Deal” to the point where it largely stopped being a talking point. More recently having gutted unions, with the gig economy sidestepping many worker protections, and 401k replacing pensions, etc has started to reawaken some of the west’s latent socialist tendencies.

Yes those are the rights I am talking about.

The leftists I know are socialists, anarchists, and communists. They are very much doing the work both politically (I live in the Pacific Northwest, where socialists are on the ballot regularly) and locally (e.g. via Food Not Bombs or restoring land to natural states).

There definitely are academics, in organizations like the DSA. But there's practical folks too.

Virtually no one who calls themselves socialists in America are actually socialists. They’re social libertarians and neoliberals cosplaying as socialists.

You can’t have a workable left-wing movement that prioritizes social libertarianism because workers invariably will be more traditional than elites. You can’t tell factory workers they can’t say this or that and that they need to learn to like foreigners. You can think it, but you can't say it, and you certainly can't call them "racist, sexist, and homophobic." If your platform morally reforming workers and their manners becomes core to your platform, then it's not a workable left-wing platform. All you'll do is split the workers and push them away: https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/postcard-from-the-hispanic-....

What you'll end up with is a coalition where economic left-wingers are the rump of a neoliberal party. The neoliberals will never give the left-wingers anything, because they don't have to. Neoliberals have no reason to do anything other than pay lip service to leftists who can't actually unify and rally the mass of workers.

There's a few distinct axes commonly labelled "left". The Democrats are quite left on some axes (e.g. concern about racism) and less so on others (e.g. siezing the means of production).

We used to call this liberalism

Some of us still do, as a useful delimiter between leftist politicians vs the centrist positions held by the democrats.

Well, left and right originated based on the parliament seating arrangement in France:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left%E2%80%93right_political...

So, traditional left/right split may not make much sense anymore and each country could have their own split for left and right sides.

The split that's now the norm in most western countries AFAICT is liberal on the left and conservative on the right.

Yes, thank you for pointing this out – but they do tend to report the facts correctly.

Except in this article, where they assert that the funds were correctly reported to the government with no explanation of what that claim even means. And they’re not saying that the defendant claimed to have reported; Reason themselves are making the claim.

Like most publications, they have editorial constraints, and usually choose to discuss the breaking news rather than rehash older facts. Reason has been covering this highly complex and lengthy case for nearly a decade, they have published dozens of articles about it, unfortunately for you they did not address your specific question in detail in this particular article. I think if you dig a bit deeper you'll find answers.

edit - 2 minutes of searching past Reason articles:

That Lacey was convicted of "international concealment money laundering" is bizarre, since the money transfer was not concealed: His lawyer informed the IRS about it, as required by law. And it was not made for nefarious purposes, according to Scottsdale lawyer John Becker's trial testimony. Lacey had needed some place to park his savings after U.S. banks, scared by a years-long propaganda crusade against Backpage, had decided doing business with the company or its associates was a reputational risk. So Becker and another lawyer advised Lacey to deposit the money—$17 million, on which taxes had been paid—with a foreign bank.

It's hard to see how Lacey conducted a financial transaction "to conceal or disguise the nature, the location, the source, the ownership, or the control of the proceeds of specified unlawful activity," even if you accept the government's premise that this money was derived from unlawful activity. And, to be clear, I don't accept that premise, since Backpage's business should have been protected by the First Amendment (not to mention Section 230 of federal communications law).

“They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by appealing to emotion or stereotypes) to favor conservative causes“

So, when they present facts, they surround them with emotional words to try to sway opinion.

That website calling CNN moderately left instantly destroys its credibility

Reason would indeed seem slanted compared to traditional liberal media, specifically as it relates to not regurgitating the DOJ’s narrative.

Happy Reason subscriber here.

Fellow Reason subscriber here. They're more balanced than most.

Reason may be "slanted", but you can follow their logic in their articles, regardless of your stance.

You could receive money legitimately (let's say, donations to your synagogue) and funnel it to politically disfavoured causes (for example, anti-war protesters in the Middle East).

It doesn't fit the metaphor of money laundering, of turning dirty money into clean, but it's usually prosecuted under the same statutes.

That isn't what money laundering is. Money laundering is taking illegally gotten funds and turning it into apparently legal funds. What you're describing is fraud: you took money for one purpose, and used it for something the donators didn't want it used for.

Notably, it is not money laundering to obscure the source of funds when they didn't come from an illicit source. Nor is it money laundering to simply obscure the source of funds, so they don't come from any apparent source. If that were money laundering, it would be illegal to withdraw cash from an ATM, which is obviously absurd.

What statute? I don't know either way what the actual definition is.

Money laundering can be defined as concealing either or both the source and destination of the funds.

Channeling legal money into illegal activities qualifies as well. Not clear either is applicable to this case however.

No, the donators gave you the money to use as you see fit. You're not betraying their trust: you're betraying your government, by funding a movement with aims inimical to them.

A relevant statute in the US is the USA PATRIOT Act [0], specifically Title III, which deals with "International money laundering abatement and terrorist financing". It absolutely does restrict transmission of clean money to non-favoured political entities, often in the same breath as it forbids actual money laundering. It does not forbid withdrawing cash from an ATM, but it does forbid a bank from issuing you an ATM card if they should have guessed you would use the money for the wrong purposes.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/107/plaws/publ56/PLAW-107publ56.htm

The PATRIOT act is bad, and it needs to go the way of the creamitorium.

mmm actually no.

money laundering - the federal crime - relies, absolutely relies on their being an illicit origin. it cannot be charged independently and relies on discovering there was an illicit origin and moving to prosecute that.

think harder about it and successful money laundering is impossible to be convicted of as an illicit origin is never discovered and probable cause is never established to get the subpoenas.

seems that nobody ever imagined that the jury convicts someone on the money laundering charge and the judge acquits on the illicit origin charge amongst others. this does seem to require an appeal to rectify and everyone agrees he has a big chance of this getting dropped on appeal too, since its just dangling disconnected from its requirements.

the other things you’re talking about would be prosecuted under different laws.

> money laundering - the federal crime - relies, absolutely relies on their being an illicit origin. it cannot be charged independently and relies on discovering there was an illicit origin and moving to prosecute that.

There are money laundering laws that require it be illicit funds.

But there are also transaction reporting requirements - like generating a currency transaction report (CTR) - that don't require the funds to be illicit. It just requires that you attempt to circumvent them.

"The transaction is designed to evade any regulations promulgated under the Bank Secrecy Act"

yes “structuring” is illegal. its not a “money laundering law”, perhaps a capital control. its unproductive to play into the idea that all movement of money is laundering and it isnt moving a discussion forward when the language is conflating everything.

I can see the categorization of "AML" - anti-money laundering law. I think then that the context hasn't been made clear, when we are discussing the actual criminal charge of money laundering, versus the criminal charge of structuring or avoiding a transaction reporting threshold.

Meh... it's the media. I wouldn't expect any precision in their reporting.

"Man guilty of violating laws in place to prevent money laundering" becomes "Man guilty of money laundering".

Money laundering laws doesn't require that the money be proceeds of crime. It only requires that you do things in an attempt to obscure the source of the money.

For example structuring cash deposits. If you have a pile of legitimate cash, say through a cash business (you pay all taxes), but you intentionally make multiple $9,000 deposits to avoid generating a CTR (currency transaction report for cash deposits over $10,000), congrats, you violated money laundering laws.

So out of curiosity, what if you run a business that just happens to generate $9K of cash regularly, for any reason?

Are you supposed to risk keeping it on premises until enough adds up, or you should tell the bank to file a CTR, or something else?

like tax evasion laws -- they're like a joker card/ wildcard -- to law enforcement. to be played when they wanna arrest you.

that's what mobsters get nabbed on, corrupt gvt officials etc. it's not difficult to prove anyone has tax evaded.

It’s not the $9k deposit that’s illegal, it’s structuring your deposits to avoid the $10k limit. The same actions can be legal or illegal depending on your in intent.

In your example, the $9k deposits are perfectly fine. Although if you really always deposit $9k you’ll probably get some questions.

You’re at risk of some over zealous prosecutor accusing you of structuring.

Overzealous prosecution.

How do you know that?

Because we know that trying to destroy Backpage was the personal crusade of Cindy McCain and it became very personal.

This has long been written about.

Any links? John bang a Backpage ho, or why the hate?

there's tons in Arizona media.

https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/michael-lacey-jim-larki...

> She is the widow of U.S. Senator John McCain from Arizona, who was the 2008 Republican presidential nominee.

Nepo-wife. And they were saying the Soviets were a decrepit society at the top, the US from today is not much better.

It's worse than that. She was a rich heiress that he left his first wife for because Cindy had the bankroll to fund his political aspirations. He was as much of a leech as she is.

Among other reasons, because the DOJ accidentally leaked their internal communication about the case to the defense which turned out to be fairly exculpatory: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6345276-Backpage-DOJ... https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6345275-Backpage-DOJ...

The defendants are precluded from using or mentioning any of this information even though it shows that the case is being wrongfully prosecuted because it is the state's attorney client privileged material which was released by mistake.

It's crazy to me that our judicial system would be happy to knowingly find innocent people guilty, just because they feel like it's more important to pretend that exculpatory evidence simply doesn't exist.

I think its the lesser of two evils.

The greater evil being what?

Not following due process.

Due process should always fall on the side of protecting the innocent.

That would have been a nice constitutional / Bill of Rights principle. Or a Supreme Court standard.

Instead many ways in which clearly innocent (or very likely innocent) people have been convicted or had appeals denied have been upheld, at the alter of not just due process, but at having no principle or procedure of adjusting due process in these cases.

In this case, how can there be information that was not submitted directly to the court given its relevance to the case? Who had that information and withheld it? That should itself be criminal. (Some information may be sensitive - but courts already deal with that in other circumstances.)

Due process adjustments for an "innocence protection principle" would still be reviewed by higher courts, so this could be a standard but rare practice with its own due process, without being a Wild West.

No system for any large organization should provide no process for exceptions to accepted practice at the ground level to be escalated.

Corporations, governments, social media sites, banks, etc. all end up crushing powerless people when they provide no recourse for unanticipated or ignored harm by the organization's current rules.

Individual humans do not have a legal pass to say, "well I have these rules for myself, and they don't include effective review or action on information about my unjustly harming you." If an individual is notified of harm, their culpability starts then. Courts would consider systematically ignoring such communication to imply a significant increase in culpability - for an individual. Throwing away such communication would be interpreted as a conscious intention to continue harming.

I’d agree if we were talking about prosecutorial evidence. Citizens rights need to be respected by the state and police do have to do the hard work of real police work correctly. But for exculpatory evidence I’d really rather we just focus hard on not sending innocent people to prison or worse.

If you want a silver lining then consider that, unlike most trials, you know with much more certainty which is the just result. When that is not reached, or reached in a roundabout uncertain way (like the ongoing money laundering conviction) then you learn about the ways in which the legal system fails to be a justice system. Arguably we learn about things we should fix.

That's a question and a half. Since he reported it, it isn't hidden.

This guy got into a pissing contest with the Arizona AG, which led to FOSTA/SESTA over the casual encounters page.

This has years of history. I worked in a similar industry to backpage for 11 years.

arguably, it is also helped get Kamala Harris into the White House. [https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-kama...]

> The first [trial], in 2021, was declared a mistrial after prosecutors and their witnesses couldn't stop talking about sex trafficking despite none of the defendants facing sex trafficking charges

Thats always been my take on the backpage case, but I didnt feel comfortable talking about it because people are too emotionally invested in curbing sex trafficking

We’d be better off just treating it as labor trafficking, and not bothering with the non-trafficked people just like the rest of the job market.

Estimated no one cares about labor trafficking. They care about other people having sex.

The irony of this being Arizona we're talking about and the significant contribution of illegal immigrants to the state economy.

Why is that ironic? Of course nobody will care about stopping labor trafficking if it benefits them.

> Of course nobody will care about stopping labor trafficking if it benefits them

Same with sex work it seems.

Sex work <> sex trafficking.

Yes, but casting anti-sex work measures as anti-sex trafficking measures has long been the propaganda norm.

The issue is that unlike cheap gardeners, where most of the population benefits and a small portion of the population loses (‘native’ gardeners - probably just a couple % of the labor force), approx. 51% of the population ‘loses’ with cheap sex work.

Which is why, in almost every jurisdiction, prostitution is illegal.

But since approx. 49% of the population ‘wins’, it is also why it still happens, just where it isn’t obvious.

why does 51% of the population 'lose' with cheap sex work?

I'm not understand what is unsaid here or is being assumed to have a shared understanding.

The vast majority of customers for sex workers (95%+?) are men, with the vast majority of workers being women.

51% of most populations are women, 49% are men.

Seems pretty obvious?

no, not obvious.

yes, the market for sex work is primarily men. of them, the vast majority are interested in heterosexual pairings from women providers.

can you finish articulating why women would be losing from cheap sex work? which women, the sex workers? a different group? what are each group losing specifically?

have you talked to any sex workers? many of them say they've gained something and I'm waiting to compare that with what you are trying to articulate

Bwahaha, have fun with that. I'm sure you'd never believe and/or would be shocked that those Latino dudes hanging out in 90% of Home Depot parking lots every morning (and getting picked up by contractors) DO NOT actually have valid work authorizations and/or US Citizenship. Not usually Mexicanos though, despite the stereotype. Same with 50-90%+ of drywallers, framers, etc. at least in the US west/south (depending on exact metro area).

And as long as it isn't too big of a hot button topic at the moment, no one does anything about it either. There will be an occasional 'whack a mole' action when it does become a hot button, then it goes back to being ignored.

Since homeowners and businesses 'win' and low value blue collar labor 'loses', not likely to change either until Labor starts getting organized again.

In any trade, someone always gets something for something. Market effects, who gets what for how much, etc. are what I’m talking about.

I appreciate the analogy, they compare dissimilar things with a common attribute.

What was the common attribute? Can you finish articulating what was asked?

Is it difficult for you to talk about sex work and women? Because I would like to have that conversation, it was an interesting prompt

I used to be an EMT. I’ve known folks from all walks of life.

You’re better off just reading some of the existing studies and materials though, there are a ton, if you’re curious. Plenty of blogs from sex workers near as I can tell too.

Also, near as I can tell, plenty of blue collar workers who wished they could get away with working in that industry!

It isn’t just ‘sex work and women’ after all.

They care about people being forced to engage in sex. Many people are trafficked into doing something they do not want to do by a partner or someone they think cares about them (look at the Andrew Tate situation).

After this comment I finally looked up Andrew Tate on wikipedia and was surprised to discover he has not actually been convicted of sex trafficking yet. Had the impression he had been... commenting in case it surprises anyone else.

Well, you can’t convict him if he’s not in the US. He’s been hiding in Romania the past few years.

The Romanian authorities indicted him. The surprise is that the Romanian authorities havent convicted him

amusing “default US” moment

Right, and they abuse anti-trafficking laws as a way to punish people for having sex.

The US and states have very active labor trafficking investigations, raids, busts, outreach, you name it. There are deep investigations many into outfits quite regularly, involving the FBI and other agencies. If it feels the opposite, it turns out we just have a large labor trafficking problem, which includes adult services/entertainment.

I can’t tell if you’re saying that sex trafficking doesn’t exist, isn’t a problem or that people don’t care about it. All positions are bonkers, but which one?

they’re saying that “downgrading” the enforcement approach of sex trafficking to just labor trafficking would mean all the enforcement and task forces go away

which I disagree with

Seems like there should be an optional trial end, in addition to conviction or acquittal, for "prosecution shouldn't have brought this case", where the accused would get some kind of compensation. I don't know the details of this case, but I remember hearing about it many years ago. I can't imagine the expense and stress of such a trial, dragging on for so long, and then at the end it's just "Okay, guess you're not guilty."

Sometimes it seems like prosecutors brought a reasonable case given the evidence and tried it fairly. In this case, I believe acquittal is the right call. Other times it seems like a case that shouldn't have been brought and you should be compensated for that and/or the prosecutor should be punished.

No need to make it optional. If the state can't convict on all counts, you should get full compensation for all expenses, including your legal bills, any time spent in prison, lost income, etc. In a case like this it would be millions of dollars, maybe tens of millions. Of course, this case probably wouldn't have happened in the first place if that was the way prosecutions worked...

Most criminal cases are open-and-shut deals where the defendant is clearly guilty, so this wouldn't change much on average. But it would ensure that 1) prosecutors only prosecute what they can actually prove, 2) innocent peoples' lives aren't destroyed.

Can you imagine the public angst around the OJ trial if THAT was what happened?

I'd rather people like OJ get some money out of a botched prosecution than the alternative. Most likely, we'd see a lot less botched prosecutions.

How many botched prosecutions are there? Most have a 90%+ conviction rate because normal people can't stand up to professional interrogation. Even innocent people can incriminate themselves to the point where it isn't worth the risk of trial, so they plead to a lesser offense.

Spend thousands going to court and possible spending 5 years in jail vs. plead out for probation. The fact that going to court and winning might see you get legal fees plus a bit of money back doesn't change the calculus -- the worst case outcome is still prison.

It certainly changes the calculus: it's much easier to get a lawyer willing to work on contingency if there is a financial reward for winning. In civil cases it's quite common for lawyers to work on contingency because so many civil cases are obviously winnable, and have an immediate payout.

Of course, in practice what really would happen is it would be far less common for prosecutors to prosecute people when there isn't a solid case against them. If what I'm suggesting was how criminal cases worked, I doubt that Backpage would have been charged at all.

Note that I also think that plea deals should be much less common, or even totally banned.

Simpson would be more deserving of it than most anyone.

This is one of those things that sounds good in theory, but is terrible in practice.

It would incentivize prosecution to avoid court at all costs. Which means de facto immunity for wealthy people who can easily afford to go to court. And it will probably make law enforcement even worse about railroading people who can't afford any legal representation.

> It would incentivize prosecution to avoid court at all costs.

Their job is to prosecute. Their only option is to pick cases that can be won. Which isn't hard, as the average person who is charged with some criminal act is not only guilty, but clearly guilty.

> Which means de facto immunity for wealthy people who can easily afford to go to court.

Money can't make a guilty man innocent. If you've actually done something wrong and there is evidence against you, the prosecution should have no qualms about prosecuting. In rare cases bad luck might lead to a payout due to a botched case or other unusual circumstance. But governments have enough money to self-insure for rare cases like that. It probably wouldn't even be a once-in-a-career event for the average prosecutor.

> And it will probably make law enforcement even worse about railroading people who can't afford any legal representation.

Rather the opposite: since full compensation is guaranteed if you win, it would be much easier to get a lawyer to work on contingency if you can convince them you are innocent. Right now that is very hard because even if you win, it's quite difficult to get the state to pay your legal bills so lawyers have no incentive to help you.

> as the average person who is charged with some criminal act is not only guilty, but clearly guilty.

I don’t even know why we have all this stuff like lawyers judges, prosecutors, hierarchy of courts, appeals. It could all be automated with kiosk at the police station.

I am not sure you are not just trolling :)

We have all that stuff because if we didn't, it's likely that prosecutors would start abusing their power a lot more, and then the average person charged would not be guilty.

  > Money can't make a guilty man innocent.

Possibly, but the legal system does not deal with guilty or innocent. The legal system deals with probabilities (e.g. probable cause among others), deals with attempts to display intent, deals with interpretations of human language, deals with emotional arguments, and many other things that are not deterministic. Money most certainly can influence those aspects.

But they already avoid court at all costs. It's why plea bargins are such a problem.

We have a very high bar for guilt in criminal trials. This is because we would rather have many guilty people go free than send an innocent person to prison (there are still mistakes, of course). Given this situation, it wouldn’t make sense to assume anyone who is not convicted on even one count is actually innocent.

> We have a very high bar for guilt in criminal trials.

If we do, then my suggestion should be easy to implement and will only impact a tiny minority of cases.

Of course, in this case it's pretty clear that the prosecution made up a bunch of charges that they knew they'd lose on to try to drain the resources of the people they were charging, as well as punish them pre-emptively. The prosecution also clearly broke the rules in other ways, eg by getting a mistrial when they kept on bringing up sex trafficking, a crime the Backpage founders simply weren't charged with.

There are plenty of actual criminals in the world that need to be prosecuted. This case is clearly a politically motivated exception.

Sounds like a false dichotomy between "cases that will always result in guilty verdicts" and "cases that the prosecution knew they'd lose but brought anyway to drain resources". You don't seem to recognize that there are many, many cases that could go either way, based on how judges rule about evidentiary matters, what the composition of the jury is, etc.

As someone who was a lawyer for years, and who has served on a jury, I have seen the ways that things can evolve in unexpected ways. IMO the vast majority of cases could go either way, depending on how rulings and jury composition turn out. Any system that doles out taxpayer money whenever the prosecution doesn't run the table is utterly naive. It would result in less prosecution, more criminals going free, and more victimization by people we didn't lock up.

Yeah, cause then prosecutors would actually have to look for exculpatory evidence before charging instead of just sitting on their asses and relying on juries assuming guilt (because why else would someone be on trial?)

That... sounds like an unreasonable bias to me

I think it's called a viewpoint. Not available in stores.

> This is because we would rather have many guilty people go free than send an innocent person to prison

No we wouldn't.

Or we wouldn't utilize the plea deal in 93% of criminal cases. And we use it with little-to-no oversight. Unless what a prosecutor offers is so -utterly egregiously inappropriate- that it causes a judge to double take, they can pretty much do as they like.

Which is why we use it more than 60x more per capita than any other country on earth, in those countries that even allow it (it's not even officially sanctioned in the UK, though it has happened - fun fact, nearly 40% of the cases appealed as a "miscarriage of justice" in the UK involved plea deals).

> A government spokesperson said: “Ensuring defendants plead guilty at the earliest possible opportunity means victims and witnesses do not have to relive their potentially traumatic experiences in court."

What? Not one word of innocence or presumption. Just "plead guilty early, we know you did it".

Even in countries that do use plea deals more often, there's strict oversight into what the deals entail and understanding of outcome.

Here, there's no incentive to rock the boat. Prosecutors push plea deals HEAVILY, innocence be damned, threatening the costs and risks of a trial (and the US over-charges people heavily) with a quick plea (that ever so conveniently allows our elected prosecutors to point to high conviction rates every re-election).

> it wouldn’t make sense to assume anyone who is not convicted on even one count is actually innocent

Oof. Not only is it "possible" you're not actually innocent, your attitude is "it doesn't even make sense to assume that". Screw it, why do we need a justice system? You were arrested, let's just take you straight to prison.

> Oof. Not only is it "possible" you're not actually innocent, your attitude is "it doesn't even make sense to assume that". Screw it, why do we need a justice system? You were arrested, let's just take you straight to prison.

Of course it's possible. But if someone is charged with 5 crimes and convicted of 4, why should we reimburse their legal fees? That is what GP proposed, and it would be nuts. If the prosecution struck out and went 0 for 5, that might make sense. But requiring them to run the table makes no sense.

Pro-rate it. If the prosecution loses 1/5 counts, the defendant is reimbursed 1/5 of their total legal expenditure.

These are criminal cases we are talking about. Cases that destroy lives when the prosecutors get it wrong. They damn well should be certain and they shouldn't be overcharging just to drain resources, as is clearly happening in this case.

If prosecutors aren't certain they can win on all 5 counts, bring 4. Or 3. Or even 1.

Most crimes should have pretty serious consequences. So convicting on one well-proven count should be enough.

I'll admit that your phrasing threw me. I thought you were saying that "let's be real, just because you were not convicted of a crime doesn't mean you didn't do it".

But yes, while not meeting the legal bar, you can as a private individual draw your own inferences - sometimes - about someone being convicted of 80% of charges... however, note still my comment on prosecution heavily over-charging people to improve conviction rates, either directly, or by contributing to fear/stress (cost of defense, consequences, risk) to bludgeon someone into a plea deal regardless of factual guilt.

To add to what other people said: we're talking about criminal trials, here "on average" isn't enough. Criminal procedure requires such a high standard of certainty(proving without a reasonable doubt, unanimity of jurors) because unlike civil trials it actually sends people to jail. So being right "on average" isn't enough because we can't afford to punish innocent people, we would rather not punish a guilty person than wrongfully punish an innocent one.

In the trial where somebody is accused of first degree murder and they are instead convicted of second degree murder, the murderer deserves all that compensation? You haven't thought this out well.

In Norway we have two different "not guilty" outcomes:

- "frifunnet på grunn av bevisets stilling" (~"acquitted because of the situation with the evidence" my best translation at 00:02 in the night) which I think in practice means it wasn't proven that the person did it and so (s)he is acquitted.

- "henlagt som intet straffbart forhold" (~"acquitted as no punishable offense" my best translation at 00:04 in the night) which I think means the investigation not only failed to prove guilt but also proved that a person was not guilty.

I tried to find better translations but wasn't able to. Feel free to fill in.

This probably matches reasonably well with the three-verdict situation in Scots law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_proven

> Under Scots law, a criminal trial may end in one of three verdicts, one of conviction ("guilty") and two of acquittal ("not proven" and "not guilty").

How is that better? "Insufficient evidence" verdict is basically slander. It shouldn’t exist. You’re supposed to be presumed not guilty unless proven otherwise. What recourse do you have if you end up with such a verdict? Should you then have to prove your own innocence? That’s exactly what we tried to avoid in the first place.

Insufficient evidence means you are free to go.

It's definitely one of those ridiculous cases, that's for sure. The feds seem to bring a lot of those.

There are 84 independent charges, the majority were overturned by a judge, and at least one mistrial has been declared due to misconduct by the prosecution.

This looks like prosecutorial abuse to me.

Wrongful convictions in the US are way too common. With that many chargers and cascading retrials like this, I'd expect at least one false conviction regardless of who is on trial.

If the guy's guilty, fine. They should have charged him with things that were supported by solid evidence instead of stuffing charges so they can keep trying him for the same things over and over until they get a guilty verdict.

This sort of case is the reason double jeopardy is supposed to be illegal in the US.

I feel sorry for any jury who has to keep track of 86 counts. The Ross Ulbricht and SBF trials look simple by comparison.

I've seen state cases that have come close to that. They're usually mass shootings, or someone ran over 75 people with a car.

There is a great judgment of Germany‘s highest courts from some years ago, where a criminal verdict was reversed and remanded. Almost in passing the court noted that the (professional) judges should have been more careful.

Of the xx counts, some were acquitted, some convicted, some both, and some neither. Of the convictions the lower court had sometimes given prison term y in the upper part of the judgment, but prison term z lower down in the text.

And so on. The higher court dryly wrote that special care has to be given when dealing with many counts.

Such a sheer waste of time, money and efforts which could have been directed elsewhere.

Like a lot of Elizabeth Nolan Brown's Backpage coverage, this feels misleading. To the extent Lacey succeeded in court, he did so on technical grounds; the decision is extraordinarily damning about Backpage itself, effectively casting it as a knowing and important link in the supply chain of human trafficking. Which, of course, is what it was. You don't so much get that analysis from Reason; you have to read the (quite long) verdict instead, which is linked from the story.

If you want to read the actual decision:

https://frontpageconfidential.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04...

America is bizarre. Technically prostitution is illegal in my state, Googling “new York city escort” shows thousands of results.

Barney Miller had an episode where a gal was delivering I♥NY buttons to hotel rooms for $75 per button.

In the Soviet Union, you would find street corners with the number 50 chalked on the sidewalk, and women standing nearby smoking. Police would gladly explain that there is no law against standing next to a number.

What an absolute waste of public resources. Somehow, cases should be weighed for public benefit rather than political gain. Idk how we can do this, but maybe open online referendum on the public desire to prosecute, with a mandate to heavily consider but not necessarily follow the public opinion?

Well he should be acquitted on all counts to do with the founding of the site. If he laundered money, that isn't good.

You have got to be kidding me. The government is the biggest criminal, this guy is nothing, this shouldn't even be a discussion.

Sure, that's why I said "if."

Typical FBI. Make up dozens and dozens of bogus charges and commit to constant harassment until enough of the people targeted kill themselves. Then when a real judge finally gets involved slink away. Just like with Aaron Swartz and Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio.

Dear people flagging this, please stop perceiving my statements through your domestic political lenses. I am not talking politics here. Just because your team is currently pro-FBI or against-FBI doesn't mean I am talking about how the FBI interacts with your team. I am not.

Indeed - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_lette...

It would help a lot if charges were an all or nothing basis. Either a jury convicts on all counts, or you go free, with all your legal bills paid and compensation for the false arrest and imprisonment.

Most criminal cases are open-and-shut deals where someone is clearly guilty of something, so for typical cases this policy wouldn't change much. But it would significantly reduce the power of government to harass innocent people.

I agree with part of your statement. I think if you were found not guilty, the state should have to pay your legal fees. It's an unfair fight against the full might of the government.

Another way to do it would be to require the state to provide funds for legal defense for everyone, regardless of income or assets, with at least with the same budget as they use for the prosecution.

Again, this won't change anything in the typical case, because the typical criminal case involves something who is clearly guilty. But it'll keep innocent people out of jail.

Or we could hire anyone who needed it a lawyer for their defense. We could call them public defenders.

I am suggesting public defenders. I'm suggesting we expand that to everyone who is charged. Because in the current system, legal bills tend to ruin people who get declared innocent and provide enormous incentives to plea to crimes people did not commit.

The police-prison-industrial complex is motivated to convict and keep millions of people incarcerated. Apropos book: Three Felonies a Day by Silerglate

And prison unions as well.

Good. Prostitution should be legal and regulated to begin with. People are getting HIV at an alarming rate because the whole system is unregulated.

HIV turned out to be easier to treat than prevent.

Sort of. PrEP exists for high risk populations. For cures: Currently, it is if you're able and willing to wipe out your own bone marrow and able to find a compatible donor who's immune. 2 giant expensive and risky IF's. CRISPR personalized medicine may also work: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/25/1082306/gene-edi...

No one does that surgery unless you have very advanced lymphoma. It’s not a cure.

You're weaseling with the ambiguity of the word "cure". I already stated the extreme conditions that approach would require. It has resulted in deliberate, although incidental, cures several times. It was certainly a cure for them.

CRISPR personalized approaches are more promising by precisely excising vDNA.

There is no panacea here.

Based on your username, I’m not sure if you have HIV but EBT 101 has begun human trials as of last year and we should find out how it turns out before the end of this year. It’s from the same team that was able to eliminate SIV from primates using the same techniques.

Very cool!

Thanks, but don't need it. (Actually a platelet donor.) I couldn't fit a whole AC/DC title into hn's restrictions, and it originally had something to do with electricity.

If treat means a lifetime of a much higher OI risk and a 2000% higher risk of cancer.

OI?

Please expand acronyms: we're not all in your context.

Opportunistic infections. TB is the number one killer of people with HIV that are medicated. Along with a host of other viruses, fungi and MRSAs. You might live for 30 years after contracting HIV but they’re going to be sick, medically expensive years.

Raising HIV against prostitution is like bringing up animal cruelty for veganism: it's not really the most important of many overlapping concerns surrounding the issue. Anti-prostitution and anti-abortion laws in the US exist because evangelical Christian white supremacists are able to tell heathens what they can't do with their bodies and pass laws to force their views on other people. These come with the burdens of jail time in the case of prostitution or losing the ability to reproduce or one's life in the case of eliminating the possibility of emergency abortions. Most of America: "The Bible says..."

> evangelical Christian white supremacists

Ah yes, the ol' reliable 'everyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi' approach

I think they described the situation fairly? The folks who legislate against sex work tend to tick most of those boxes.

To be fair, there is real shade to throw at traditional neoliberal uppercase Democrats of the 90's-10's too: copying features of conservatism but then putting off most of the country with bicoastal elitism. The Clintons and Reagans were both out of touch and announced policy on issues without much community engagement.

Sex work is legal and more-or-less regulated in most of the UK and Europe even where Le Pen-flavor nationalism is ascending in prevalence.

The US has a special kind of polarized infighting and much more variance in rights and restrictions that the rest of the world. For example, if I were to say "I'm pro conceal carry guns for people who continue to show demonstrably sane and stable residents." this wouldn't fly in most of Europe or Australia, regardless of right or left party across the way except for perhaps the fringe far-right. That is to say: norms in America differ significantly from the rest of the world in sometimes disquieting ways to outsiders, due to enduring historical roots and political interests. Perhaps a compromise to placate the majority of Americans would be: "don't touch the right to bear arms in exchange for bodily autonomy and healthcare."

The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing didn't happen in a vacuum. It was 100% homegrown terrorism that thrived and came to pass in a culture of government conspiracy theories, Waco, white nationalism, and failure to care for and reintegrate Gulf War vets. Chris Hedges wrote a book on the topic: American Fascists (2008). Excluding Jan 6th as different kind of event, that there hasn't been another domestic terrorism mass casualty event due to diligent work by law enforcement combined with a tinge of dumb luck.

I'd argue plenty of democrats fit that description as well.

> Perhaps a compromise to placate the majority of Americans would be: "don't touch the right to bear arms in exchange for bodily autonomy and healthcare."

Most of the leftists I know are extremely strong opponents to gun control. Marx was pretty clear on the importance of an armed working class, and leftists tend to take that to heart ime.

>>The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing didn't happen in a vacuum. It was 100% homegrown terrorism that thrived and came to pass in a culture of government conspiracy theories, Waco, white nationalism, and failure to care for and reintegrate Gulf War vets. Chris Hedges wrote a book on the topic: American Fascists (2008). Excluding Jan 6th as different kind of event, that there hasn't been another domestic terrorism mass casualty event due to diligent work by law enforcement combined with a tinge of dumb luck.

There was also Ruby Ridge, which was absolutely disgusting policing.

And most of the "domestic terrorism" today involves FBI agents trying to bait people into committing offences such as in the Whitmer "kidnapping".

White supremacists? Really?

And something tells me Muslims, practicing Jews, etc. aren’t a fan of prostitution either.

So really you could just say “religious people,” and it’d be far more accurate.

Do we have many conservative Muslim or Jewish legislators? I would figure they tend to come from more progressive districts...

Don't be surprised. I'm sure there is at least one Jainist Republican American. Religion and conservatism seem to be correlated positively with one another. No particular group or identity membership mandates membership in another. And I'm sure there are a zillion libertarian agnostics and atheists who follow some styles of the broad tent of conservatism without the authoritarian forcefulness of others who want to limit the rights of others, on both sides of the political spectrum.

It's my unpopular and minority opinion that the world would be better without some or most religions but would be better off with the trappings of what churches provide: community, friend networks, singing together, reflecting on philosophy, and mutual aid. Although, I'm absolutely sure the world would be better without the cult of Scientology. https://www.scientology-austin.org/about-us/grand-opening.ht...

The people who make the laws about prostitution are the set of people under discussion. Not Americans at large.

From a European perspective, it is a bit interesting to see it being described like that. Anti-prostitution has become a rather large far-left political priority, with the right and far-right taking opposition. In the far-left perspective, prostitution represent a form of slavery. For similar reasons, anti-pornography laws are generally proposed from the left side of the political spectrum, and then naturally opposed by the right.

It should be added that while typical evangelical Christian voters are sought by right-leaning political parties, voters of the second largest faith is generally sought by left-leaning political parties. This is currently very noticeable given the a specific conflict in the world. Religious voters and political parties that want to cater to those voters are no longer limited to left or right.

There is a feminist case against prostitution as well. EG https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/june-2022/women-should-not-be...

Certainly. There's a feminist case for it as well. Interestingly, that article opens with a left/right framing.

'laws against child murder are because of white supremacists and their barbarous religion'

If I’m not mistaken, animal cruelty is the number one reason for vegans being vegans. What exactly are you saying?

While it should be a top reason, it's an extremely unpersuasive reason in the real world because people want their bacon burgers so long as they don't have to see what happens in a slaughterhouse or pay for the total cost of externalities of their consumption lifestyle choices.

There are much more pressing, self-interested reasons to advocate veganism:

1. Meat ag and bushmeat lead to pandemics: bovine tuberculosis, "Spanish" flu, Nipah, SARS, H7N7, H1N1, MERS, COVID. There are others.

2. Meat ag abuses the same antibiotics humans take (but manufactured in the veterinary supply chain) for purely economic reasons (mostly, to make animals grow faster) leading to the evolution of antibiotic resistant microbes and making antibiotic medications in humans less effective.

3. Climate change. It contributes 1/6 of all human GHG activity.

4. Air, soil, and water pollution are the result of mega grain farms, large pig farms, and CAFOs.

5. It's resource intensive and drives up the cost of all food by shunting more water, diesel fuel, arable land, etc. to less output.

6. Along with palm kernel oil, it's a leading driver of old growth deforestation.

7. And it hurts both the cute and the ugly critters.

> While it should be a top reason, it's an extremely unpersuasive reason in the real world

Well it’s conditionally persuasive depending on the animal and people’s priors. Dogs vs horses vs pigs, etc.

Agreed on all your points though.

Yeah. Sigh. I'm realistic because the "meat is murder" with gross-out signage of slaughterhouse porn billboard-sign-on-cars approach hasn't really taken off.

In other news, Moolec is developing GMO "Piggy Sooy" to taste like pork by inserting pork genes into beans. (I'm wondering: will it be Halal or Kosher?) Impossible Foods' "beef" relies on heme from GMO yeast, while Moolec plans to have GMO "beef" too.

yeast is an organism too - bread is murder

Unleavened bread baked in a microwave oven still grows to a volume intermediate between traditional unleavened bread and bread leavened with yeast or baking powder.

I actually prefer the taste of such microwaved unleavened bread that I make myself and I also prefer the fact that due to its higher density and cohesiveness (in comparison with bread leavened with yeast) it requires more vigorous and more prolonged chewing, which is healthy for the teeth (and for dental implants) and it causes greater satiety.

Therefore I spare the life of yeast :-)

The colonies of yeast thank you for your sacrifice (although it sounds like a win win situation anyway)

I personally like the legal and regulated approach, specifically because it comes with routine worker testing and consumer protections and labor rights

apparently sex workers like decriminalized, because non-compliance with the regulated regimes have so far been a parallel illegal system

but I cant think of any industry we would listen to who answered “how about just a completely hands off decriminalized approach” if asked to choose between illegal, unregulated, legal and regulated

I don’t think decriminalized comes with adequate consumer protection, and the problems with legalized systems can be addressed by fixing how non-compliance is penalized, and by providing incentives to join the regulated system instead of just penalties for not

regarding trafficking, well keep prosecuting that. as labor trafficking. make more avenues of support for the laborer which is far easier with labor rights. what people find hardest to reconcile is the idea of giving up on preventing trafficking, nothing they support right now is doing that or capable of doing that while burdening everyone else.

This wasn't prostitution on trial, it was a bunch of pimps and human traffickers. Just because they "are just an app" doesn't change the nature of their crime.

Not sure what your comment HIV has to do with anything either when it comes to that case.

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