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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Since the same comment is getting posted over and over about the light sentence, I'm raising this quote here for visibility:

> Prosecutors did not recommend a specific sentence for Ms. Ellison, but they filed a memo to Judge Kaplan praising her “exemplary” cooperation with the government. Her lawyers requested that she serve no prison time.

> “I have seen a lot of cooperators. I have never seen one like Ms. Ellison,” Judge Kaplan said before announcing the sentence. “What she said on the stand was very incriminating of herself, and she pulled no punches about it.”

> Judge Kaplan said the difference between Ms. Ellison and Mr. Bankman-Fried was that “she cooperated and he denied the whole thing.”

We knew her sentence would be light back during SBF's trial because she was a key witness in that case. The prosecutors traded her sentence for his.

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Makes sense. This precedent creates the incentives for criminals to cooperate in the future.

Are you saying that if SBF had cooperated in the same way, he would also have gotten 2 years instead of 25? Then he was really badly advised by his lawyers.

In the USA if you exercise your right to a trail then a very heavy trial tax is imposed, especially in Federal cases. https://naacp.org/resources/eliminating-illegal-practice-tri...

You have the right, but you are severely punished if you dare exercise it. This is 'just' (as in keeping with justice) because it helps reduce the strain on our justice system that is not designed and can in no way handle a non-trivial amount of cases actually going to trial and people exercising their rights. Just like companies can no longer function without people giving up their rights and requiring binding arbitration, our justice system would not be able to function if people didn't give up their right to trial.

The USA used to make fun of China because it has enshrined rights in it's constitution that, in practice, are not available or not applicable in actual daily life. I have free speech, but not where people would hear it. I have the right to a trial, but with it comes actuality the government will change my sentence to near life (or the portion of life that has any quality to it) if I dare avail myself of that right.

How many people close to you will die if you dare take your case to trial and get a trial tax imposed? How much of your childrens' lives will you miss? How long will they suffer without you earning money to support them? Or, will you miss out on the child rearing years completely when one starts a family because of the lengthy trial tax? Best to take the plea. There's a reason the Feds conviction rate is 95%, it's the explicit threat/coercion that is the trial tax. Remember, the longer the sentence, the rougher the prison you are sent to as well, because your security rating is heavily based on remaining sentence length. So it's not just a threat of length, but also the level of violence you will be subjected to during imprisonment.

Ironically, you have to testify that you were not coerced, to the judge, in court, to get out of having the trial tax imposed when you take your plea, when the very same judge knows of and is the person who applies the trial tax.

Being guilty and having no reasonable out, while using the justic system procedures as a hail Mary so that you might escape on a technicality should be punished. If you have no remorse you are a clear danger to society.

> being guilty

It is important to dispute this line of thinking because we are ALL guilty of many things through our lives. Our legal system is complicated and whether you think something is just or ethical has no bearing to whether it is legal.

Also remember if I "lie" to a federal agent, I go to prison but when Michael Flynn does it... The whole crime is a disgrace. Why is lying to a federal agent a crime? If they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt what I said was a lie, why does it matter what I said? They already know the truth. If they don't independently know what I said was a lie, how can they prove I lied? And if this is somehow something I missed, why does the national security advisor get a pardon? If he gets a pardon, why don't everyone else convicted of the same charge also get a pardon? This is not justice.

So there are two different things here that you are conflating: the specific pardoning of Michael Flynn and whether lying to a federal agent should be a crime.

Lying to a federal agent is a crime because the Government wants to make it easy to investigate crimes. Hence, lying to them being a crime. You are wasting the taxpayers money by mis-directing the investigators who represent us and are supposed to be investigating crime. That seems reasonable to me, though I did spend some time working as a contractor for the FBI, so I might have incorporated their views too much.

Michael Flynn's case in particular was a travesty because of the pardon power, a weird old legacy of monarchy brought over into our system by people who didn't really think it through, like a lot of weird, arcane corners of the US government. Pardons in general I think we would be better off without. Either it is used for small-bore corruption of the justice system like this, or it is used for things that really ought to be moved through the traditional justice system (pardoning all of the Vietnam draft dodgers, pardoning Nixon, etc.).

If you rob a bank, but the money is recovered, should that be a crime?

I wasn't mincing words. The statement is predicated on being guilty as charged. Not a difficult concept.

What a great mindset. People should be punished for exercising their rights based on an external interpretation of their motive. You realize you are saying rights should only exist after analyzing peoples' intention which is totally contrary to the Universalist definition of rights given by the constitution. To you rights are not something that all people should just intrinsically have. Just like the 'rights' granted by the Chinese constitution.

Nate Silver interviewed SBF before the court case for his book, and asked if he would accept a plea deal:

> The last question I asked him is Hey Sam, what if they gave you a two-year plea deal, right? Two years in some minimum security prison and then you can't do some trading stuff for some probationary period of time. Bankman Fried said no, he wouldn't take that deal. His day in court was worth the risk.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0jqbjp5

Bankman-Fried has a superhuman ability to ignore sound advice.

Whatever it is that got SBF in this mess it's the same thing that prevented him getting out of it with a light sentence. I don't know if that means he deserves it exactly - it seems like a better system wouldn't put a person like him in the place where he could do so much damage, but that's kinda where we're at.

Going to a federal trial in general is almost always a mistake. The feds rarely lose cases; the plea bargain they offer is almost always going to be the best option for you.

Maybe they'd lose more cases if they had to try their cases.

SBF didn't have anyone bigger to flip on.

Who is SBF going to flip on up the chain? The Feds give deals to people lower on the hierarchy to get the people at the top (in this case, in their judgement, SBF alone).

He could have feigned remorse, admitted guilt and flipped it on her.

I dont think that would work. the DOJ had picked the big fish and it was him, for good reason.

Did you read what he was doing while this case went on? Dude was on talk shows and podcasts and posting online while constantly admitting to felonies. I can't think of a worse client, there was absolutely nothing his lawyers could do short of a literal (not figurative) gag.

"Are you saying that if SBF had cooperated in the same way, he would also have gotten"

Why are you asking a rando about a judicial decree?

The legal systems in most countries are rather more nuanced than your if ... then clause.

He’s the trigger man and she’s the gold finger

Probably not, because he led the conspiracy.

True or not he could have created a pretty strong argument the investors purposefully selected a guy set up with all the moral hazards to run off the rails and make them cash while frontrunning a casino. Frame it as a clever deck of plausible deniability by rich elites who created the perfect recipe of a crime without actually explicitly inviting it.

We all know the investors knew what they were doing when they sent this arrogant, inexperienced, greedy sociopath on his course. Unfortunately for him he didn't realize he was also a patsy, and he took pretty much all the heat.

that is a defense you can try to spin in the media, but not a legal defense.

Caroline let it fall up

So all diddy needs to do is get on the stand and describe every single party of his and he’ll get a slap on the wrist?

While there should be more incentives to cooperate, like the type of prison, allowed visits, etc. claiming someone should serve less time because they described so much of their own crimes is kind of silly

In the real world, a prosecutor can only nail a higher-up with the cooperation of the people lower down. Those people only cooperate if they get a lighter sentence. It's too bad, but that's how it is and it plays out every day in criminal courts.

As for Diddy: a real, disinterested DOJ would say, "oh, you can testify against <people more famous than you>? Well, we might be able to cut you a deal."

Of course, if the DOJ is not interested in prosecuting those people, then no deal. If they think Diddy is already important enough and they can't let him slide, then no deal, or at least, a medium-stiff sentence.

Finally, two years in prison is not a picnic. See if you want to do it.

> Finally, two years in prison is not a picnic. See if you want to do it.

Seriously. I'm shocked how cavalier people are about the lengths of prison sentences. Two years in prison is a LOOONNNNGG time.

I was once detained for an hour in a small room at a border. Being deprived of my freedom, my phone, and any comfort, was fairly devastating.

Two years is very short in the US for serious crimes. The US has more people in prison per capita than any other developed country by a wide, wide, wide margin, largely in part because of the judicial system's willingness to hand down sentences for relatively minor crimes that would be seen as insane in most other countries.

For what she was charged with, two years is probably the bare minimum that was available at sentencing given the constraint of "must serve jail time".

Meanwhile in Germany, the sentence range for human trafficking is 6 months to a max of 5 years. Stealing a child is also max 5 years (if you're not intending to sell it).

The contrast is pretty stark.

Basically every free person in the US can get a 26,000 lb truck or a semi auto rifle in under an hour.

Germany has taken the other approach and implemented policies to make their country closer to a prison with all kind of harsher regulations, then reducing prison time.

There are merits to be found in either approach.

genuinely interesting thought. I haven't decided if it carries any water, but interesting.

Why would harsher penalties be required in a place where individuals have more capability to do harm? That seems to place a lot of faith in a linear efficacy of deterrence

Incapacitation.

After she comes out she can write a book maybe sell movie right etc and she will be ok. Look at Anna Delvey or Jordan Belfort. Maybe she hid some crypto.

But a lighter sentence could, for example, range from no jail time to rates of less than 100 percent of the expected sentence in the case of non-cooperation. The prosecutor's recommendation of no jail time is frankly disappointing. She may not have been the main offender, but she committed the crimes. What would her sentence have been if she did not cooperate (and suppose other did or there was enough evidence anyway)? Fifteen+ years? Two years is not a picnic, but given the alternative, it looks like it is.

The prosecutor didn't recommend no jail time. Ellison's lawyers did.

Also, in addition to jail time, she's going to owe a huge sum of money. The feds are going to have a claim on any money she makes for the rest of her life.

For better or worse (I think a little of both), long max sentences exist in the US criminal justice system to allow rewarding cooperators and to threaten non-cooperators alike.

> Prosecutors did not recommend a specific sentence for Ms. Ellison

It was her lawyers that asked for no jail time. Not the prosecutors.

According to the article I read (CNBC), "The prison term was significantly stiffer than the recommendation by the federal Probation Department that Judge Lewis Kaplan sentence Ellison, who had run the hedge fund Alameda Research, to three years of supervised release, with no time at all behind bars". In the same article, "Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon urged Kaplan for leniency".

It seems to me, as prosecutors and Probation Dept talk to each other, that all, except Kaplan, agreed on no prison time for Ellison.

> The prosecutor's recommendation of no jail time is frankly disappointing

It could have been disingenuous. Maybe they knew the judge wouldn't go for it.

As for her not cooperating: would you rather SBF skate free?

I don't know what the case against SBF would have looked like without her, and I suspect you don't, either.

You suspect well, I do not. Let me ask you another question for which you and I do not know the answer. Since she got 2 years in prison, she was not promised (i.e. she did not sign any binding agreement with the prosecutor, beyond "we will do our best to get you a lenient sentence") not to go to prison. Why then not a sentence of 5, 10, 15 years in prison?

Why not just nail her to the wall after the fact? Is integrity of the prosecutor a valid answer?

In almost any profession, your word is all you have. Welsh on someone, and no one will trust you anymore.

I did not say or believe that the prosecutor lied or they should renege on their word, far from it. I said that if she got two years, it means that the agreement Ellison-DA was not for no prison time in exchange for cooperation.

Thus I asked why two years and not five or ten of whatever time under the expected sentence time in case of no cooperation.

The prosecutor doesn't pick a time, and cant promise it. The judge selects the sentence. This judge thought 2 years was reasonable after the fact, and was not bound to it.

Read who I was replying to (which was not you). They said,

"Is integrity of the prosecutor a valid answer?"

Yes it is.

I don't know how that all plays out, to be perfectly honest.

She didn't just describe her own crimes, although I'm sure that played a part.

She also described somebody else's crimes, and did that in a way which helped the government with sentencing the "real villain."

You only get a reduced sentence if you cooperate in the prosecution against someone else the government / prosecutor is just as or more interested in. That wouldn't be the case with the diddle.

Not technically true. Even without a formal plea, you can enter a plea of guilty and throw yourself on the mercy of the court. Showing remorse and admitting your crimes definitely makes judges like you more!

We want to bribe criminals to betray each other. The people who they are betraying could do anything up to killing them to prevent this, and we have to compete with that.

The world gets zero benefit to imprisoning this woman indefinitely, it in fact costs money, and if the government had to prove their case against her without her cooperation, it would just cost even more money. Not letting a fully-cooperating sucker like her off is the opposite of a deterrent to crime. It's telling low-level people who are involved in crimes that it's better to keep quiet. We want to encourage them to betray. I hope when she gets out she becomes a celebrity, and it encourages other young people to decide to whistleblow or turn snitch on the scammy companies they work for.

> The world gets zero benefit to imprisoning this woman indefinitely

What sorts of people does the world benefit from imprisoning indefinitely, and where on the spectrum does, say, being a serial and unrepentant shoplifter, stealing mid-four figures sums compare to being a financial criminal stealing mid-eight-figure sums?

She wasn't a 'low level whistleblower', she was one step below the ringleader, and only came clean after the whole thing went tits up and she was staring down two decades in federal.

If you're looking for heroes and whistleblowers, I don't think there were any in that whole organization. Just rats turning on eachother once the trap snapped shut around them.

I think a serial shoplifter or thief is worse. It is a bigger problem for me personally, and impacts far more people. Therefore I think it deserves harsher penalties.

A thief will steal from a few stores. A fraudster of that magnitude steals from anywhere between thousands to millions of people.

There is the magnitude of an individual and the magnitude of the summer for each problem.

>So all diddy needs to do is get on the stand and describe every single party of his and he’ll get a slap on the wrist?

Do you honestly think this is how the legal system works?

No, because when prosecutors offer a light sentence to a secondary criminal in a conspiracy, it's usually a strategic decision to secure cooperation in prosecuting the main target. It wouldn't make sense that a lighter sentence for an accomplice/secondary sets a precedent for a principal actor and Diddy is the principal actor in his case, AFAIK.

(I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with any of this, just saying this is the internally consistent approach.)

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