"Jeff Bezos and Amazon tried to imprison my husband"
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I've been involved in (commercial) civil cases in numerous countries. I can say from experience that the civil legal system in China, of all places, is ~50x cheaper, 4x faster, and in the end it attains better results -- in large part because it is cheaper and faster.
In the US, even a totally uncomplicated Federal civil suit is going to cost you $200k-500k(+) and take a couple of years. Families who are forced to defend themselves usually end up broke, or get beaten up by teams of expensive attorneys when they are forced to argue their own cases in court pro se and in forma pauperis.
It's surely far worse when criminal prosecution and asset forfeiture are involved, as was the case in the link at OP.
Ultimately, it's like that old saying, "the punishment is the process." If you're exposed to the courts, you lose. (Even if you win, you can lose, because the US court system makes it very difficult to collect on judgments.) It's a shame that the courts have become a weapon that companies like Amazon use, as a blunt tool, to gain commercial advantage.
2. Judges in China tend to ask plantiff to negotiate with defendant instead of going through a whole lawsuit process for civil cases.
That happens in the US as well. Judges can refer cases to mediation before trial.
https://www.commerciallitigationupdate.com/what-to-do-when-y...
Imagine a contract case where the issues are in plain text, black and white, but the Judge won't even look at the contract until the process of discovery is complete and you've racked up a year's worth of legal bills.
This is an interesting read, and things have gotten no better since 1987; they've gotten much worse: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
In China, I don't believe that there was any discovery process -- perhaps there was something that the lawyers did behind the scenes, but it was certainly nothing like it is in America. Cases go before judges fast, and then they go to trial fast, and they generate less useless paper. (And fewer billable hours.) It can be as little as 6 months from start to finish.
I don't think this is true. Cases - especially frivolous ones - are dismissed all the time, and usually on Motion to Dismiss stage before discovery. And it's usually a judge that decides whether a case has enough potential merit to survive the motion, so saying a judge doesn't get to see the case until after discovery is incorrect.
If a company like Amazon sues you via its attorneys -- even if the matter is at root frivolous or even if they're just trying to bully you -- your odds of getting off the hook before discovery are pretty much zero.
...As in OP, where it appears the civil suit did go to discovery even though it looks like an open-and-shut contract matter.
> And it's usually a judge that decides whether a case has enough potential merit to survive the motion, so saying a judge doesn't get to see the case until after discovery is incorrect.
The courts can dismiss a case prior to discovery only in certain circumstances. They are:
(1) lack of subject-matter jurisdiction;
(2) lack of personal jurisdiction;
(3) improper venue;
(4) insufficient process;
(5) insufficient service of process;
(6) failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted; and
(7) failure to join a party.
The judge will only look at these matters, and will not judge the case on its merits. A lot of cases are dismissed on "failure to state a claim" because the complaints weren't properly written.
The purpose of discovery is to turn up evidence relevant to the trial. That seems... pretty important. The Chinese approach might be faster, but with less evidence before the court, you're arguably making justice worse in the process, by preventing all evidence from being shown to the courts.
There may be an element of surprise for one side, but tremendous delays and expenses are averted.
Having experienced both civil justice systems, let me put it like this: I never want anything to do with the American courts; there's no winning and no justice. I'd never sue anybody in a US court, and I'd hate to be sued -- whether I'm right or wrong, even if I've been robbed, it makes no difference.
I'd gladly defend myself in a Chinese court, though, and I'd not hesitate to bring a case if I was cheated.
I know it's weird, but that's the situation.
That doesn't really fix the issue of the plaintiff holding exculpatory evidence (or defendant holding incriminating evidence) but not presenting them at trial.
So under $10k, both sides present to judge 10 minutes each and a decision is given. No depositions other than questions at trial by judge.
$10-100k both sides present to a judge for up to 100 minutes. This can be a sped up version of each side presenting then getting turns to rebut and the judge asking questions. Online depositions, max half a day. Then a decision.
$100k- $1m 3 days or less of trial. Regular discovery questions, max one day of depositions.
$3m or higher... Regular civil trials.
Again I don't know what the contract Amazon had allowed and disallowed and what the lawyers can or can't prove in court, but it certainly - at least from the quick reading of it - does not seem like the case of "Amazon prosecuting innocent person out of the blue" but seems a lot like "Amazon employee did something which looks a lot like your standard kickback scheme". And their argument "but the deals I brought were awesome" does not really sound impressive - they may be awesome, but if you work for company A and bring an awesome deal with company B, you expect a bonus from the company A, not a kickback from the company B. If you do the latter, you're in a hot water regardless of how awesome the deal is.
Do I miss something substantial in this story?
Even after they recognized that the government was entirely full of shit they took 7 months to recognize that you can't plead guilty to helping someone commit something that was not itself a crime and at time of writing seemingly haven't returned the money the government illegally robbed victim of.
The start of the prosecution was a material misrepresentation by Amazon. Amazon would have been correct to fire him. They deliberately misrepresented the nature of the law and conduct to turn America's justice system into their attack dog to destroy these people are your expense.
I have no idea. US Criminal code is literally thousands of pages long, and I have no idea whether any of the specifics of what Nelson did fits any of those pages. What I do know is that every corporate training I ever had drilled not to do exactly what Nelson had done, repeatedly, at length, with the test at the end which asked "can you do what Nelson had done?" and would not let you pass until you answered "no, never ever!". And Nelson must have known it. There's no way a person at his position wouldn't be aware of what's going on. This is pure George Constanza defense.
So if Nelsons claim "we may be scammers but you can't prove it" - sure, maybe it's true. Maybe it's not. That's for the lawyers that get paid my monthly salary every time they open their mouth to argue out. Fortunately both sides can afford them. I an not nearly qualified to predict the outcome of their argument.
What am I not missing here is that the story is not "Bezos attacks my innocent husband for nothing". On the contrary - if I am getting the story correctly and not miss a substantial fact here - the story is "My husband and his friends tried to scam Bezos using what they thought is a legal loophole and turned out it's not as easy as they thought". Maybe they will get away with it, maybe not - that really doesn't matter that much to me. But if they expect me to be all outraged "how dares Bezos to go after people who scam his company" - sorry, I'm out of that one. Unless somebody can explain to me how it wasn't a scam, "may not technically be criminal because we have good lawyers" does not do much for me.
> to turn America's justice system into their attack dog to destroy these people are your expense
I'm all for law enforcement to not be an attack dog of rich and powerful people. I dream about the day where it would be true. But this is not a good showcase for that, to be honest - Amazon and the government may have screwed up the prosecution on this one (not a rare occurrence for the government - I mean, they still have trouble to properly prosecute 9/11 attackers, what do you expect on less obvious cases?) but the defendants aren't exactly the sympathetic innocents, I'd say they as close to deserving all of it as I can think of.
https://www.globalcompliancenews.com/anti-corruption/anti-co...
Either this was the best ammo they had or they are horrendously incompetent.
It feels like a straightforward federal private->private bribery law would run into the commerce clause of the constitution so we have this hodge-podge instead. Perhaps some states have more straightforward statutes.
Do I think he belongs in jail? That threshold of proof has not been met.
Would I ever hire or do business with the husband or the wife? Definitely not. That threshold is very low, and they're far over it.
US government being horrendously incompetent is like the least surprising revelation this case could make. I mean we just witnessed the head of the service which was created to protect the President from all imaginable threats to claim it's impossible to put a sniper on a slightly sloped roof - right after a sniper shot a (former) President from that roof. Compared to that level of incompetence, a botched prosecution is small change. They probably have thousands under their collective belts.
I'm not sure what the lesson here is. Obviously, if you are going to do these insider scams then don't do what the Army lady did because then when you are caught you do not have a defence. On the other hand you should be very careful to make sure your legitimate business doesn't look like an insider scam because the DOJ will come after you thinking you committed an insider scam and even if you successfully defend yourself you will be massively out of pocket.
Just to add it also looks like Neumann from WeWork (https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-conflict-interest-rel...) was doing insider dealing very similar to what the defendants were accused of doing and I don't think Neumann was ever charged by the DOJ so I can see why the defendants might feel they have been unfairly targeted by the DOJ.
1. Amazon is suing this person on the basis of contracts which did not forbid this behavior
2. the DOJ is presumably involved because this looks like criminal kickbacks
3. This person is just arguing against (1)
I would guess the DOJ approached Amazon first, and this is part of Amazon trying to cover their ass and avoid deeper scrutiny into the company’s role of enabling and agreeing to alleged kickbacks
> I would guess the DOJ approached Amazon first
No, this is clear retaliation against a competitor. Amazon has contacts at the DOJ (and other government agencies). I bet it was the other way around. Aggressive stupidity in the face of the facts is easier to understand when you realize it's either a favor or a bribe.
Obviously you couldn't be in good faith talking of the company front-running land purchases and reselling the same land a day later for 20% profit as a "competitor" of Amazon.
So, again: who is the competitor you have in mind, and what business do you think they're in?
> Obviously you couldn't be
Don't do this. It's a clear sign you're not interested in a good faith discussion.
1. Amazon told DOJ that there was a breach of contract.
2. DOJ did not verify and confiscated everything.
3. Turns out, there was no breach of contract.
4. DOJ did not NOT punish Amazon for providing the wrong information which triggered all this.
And I think the author makes two very valid points: The DOJ should have been forced to actually read the contract in question and verify that there was a criminal breach BEFORE destroying someone's live. And the DOJ should have punished Amazon or its lawyers for misrepresenting what the contract contained.
That said, what her husband did (buying land based on insider information) was certainly unethical. It just wasn't illegal.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/after-3-years-seattles... (https://archive.ph/R6xfZ)
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/doj-withdraws-g... (https://archive.ph/BGGe8)
Related HN thread from 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34184540
But the thread itself is internally inconsistent. One post claims that we’d never hear about this because the mainstream media is in Amazon’s pocket (with an explicit appeal that they aren’t for some reason in Musks).
But then she links to a Wapo article about the case. The post is famously owned by Jeff Bezos.
Whether or not there is some legal argument that he didn't violate his employment contract anyone would recognize the conflict of interest at the heart of those transactions as fraud. Seems like the feds or Amazon just bungled the case.
This is funny to juxtapose with Neil Gorsuch giving accounts of honest people getting tied up in criminal cases or byzantine regulations for reasonable behavior. Hard to escape the conclusion the system is tuned to reward those with resources rather than find justice.
Thankfully we have the law and contracts to save us from this kind of sentiment.
Somehow, Amazon would decide to buy exact parcel that his real estate friend just acquired couple weeks before.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> On July 30, 2019, Ramstetter and Camenson, working without Watson’s knowledge, bought the land and then sold it to Amazon for $116.4 million, turning a $17.7 million profit on land they owned for less than a day. Attorneys for Amazon contend Casey Kirschner supported the price internally at Amazon in exchange for a $5 million kickback, which he then allegedly split with Nelson.
https://www.geekwire.com/2021/former-aws-real-estate-manager...
As for me, I'd rather deal with ethical people who break the law than unethical people who follow the law...
It turns the original sob story into a different kind of rage bait.
The thread carried all the hallmarks of crazy-person writing and obviously telling just one side of the story, but I really didn't want to chase down the details myself.
Second saying that Jeff Bezos wrote (and further that he tried to imprison her husband) it makes the OP loose credibility (especially as an attorney) for her argument (regardless of the outcome). While it's possible Jeff did write it (in the sense that a plant in the garden couldn't have written it because plants can't write) it's not credible to imply that fact to prove your point.
Also a law degree is not 'helpful no matter what route you take' from my many many years of business experience and interactions it can actually hold you back. Because you might tend to look at edge cases (such as this one) and make judgements based on things you know. Not to mention it takes years of study which detracts from other things you might learn that might be more helpful.
Do you sincerely believe she meant that literally? She's clearly being sarcastic and using it to name drop Bezos via his twitter handle.
This is near exactly my point. The outrage rising to the level as if amazon is just a truly evil entity and all based on perhaps a few bad experiences confirmed by this particular story.
"Slander is a false statement, usually made orally, which defames another person. "
It’s pretty easy to tut tut when you weren’t the one to suffer all of the losses which she describes.
Making them whole seems like the necessary remedy, and making it so expensive that Amazon nor its peers do it again seems like the appropriate recourse.
> Lying to the FBI is a federal crime.
> But prosecutors selectively enforce the law. They choose winners & losers.
> So forgive me if I think it's empty when AG Garland says DOJ enforces law "without fear or favor."
This is true in most local jurisdictions as well. For example in LA, SF, Portland, and Seattle the city prosecutors regularly choose to not enforce the law against offenders, and simply release them back into the public without consequence. The same thing happens at all levels of the government. For example the DOJ doesn’t pursue cases against states like California that maliciously violate constitutional law or SCOTUS rulings. And so it is the same in this case too it seems.
Do you have specific examples of this?
I find this situation kind of interesting as it's incredibly rich real estate developers who did seem to be playing some kind of game vs the third richest person in the world who runs a vastly larger scummier enterprise. I don't really think either party is "regular people".
Is there some reason you want to bring his ethics into it? I don’t want Amazon to jail people for what they take to be ethics.
It's a great pity Audible is under the Amazon umbrella because I'm hooked on that.
Next time you buy something on Amazon, search it on AliExpress. You’ll likely find the same thing for 0.1x the price, but with a long lead time and minimum order quantity.
Edit: looks like some instances are still alive and I assume coasting under the radar, but the original nitter project is still dead.
Boycotts don’t work against a multibillion dollar company. We need government to break up big tech like they did to the railroads
But my statement was less about performing a boycott, and more about quality of life, personal ethics, and avoiding situations like in the linked thread.
Also, how in the world is "civil asset forfeiture" (aka pure government theft) legal in the US of all places?
They make criminal accusations against your property and not against you, and because of that, you have no rights or recourse. This is just blatant nonsense under the US legal system, but that's kind of irrelevant.
Civil forfeiture was introduced to take houses and cars from drug dealers as part of the War on Drugs, which was really started as war on minorities and hippies. The government wants to take stuff from drug dealers, so it gets to do it (see legal realism: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/legal_realism).
This is exactly the reason.
Gov PR, media, tv, film tells you it only does this to “bad” people. While that _may_ be true, it also impacts a small amount of innocent individuals caught between the crosshairs of a multibillion dollar company, their army of retained lawyers, and politics.
Cash? No they raided their house. Other accounts? Those will be frozen too. Crypto? They'll lock you out of exchanges. What can't be seized?
It seems like the only real thing you can do is have a support network.