Ex-U.S. Agent Charged with Bitcoin Theft to Plead Guilty
bitcoinmagazine.com
bitcoinmagazine.com
I haven't seen so many plot twists in a long time (this, mtgox, etc)
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/01/26/arts/ap-us-books-...
i bet this corrupt officer doesnt get 30+ years
Edit: Swartz was offered a 6 month sentence as a plea bargain, but turned it down, so if the cop gets more than 6 months you could (in some sense) say he is being punished more than Swartz.
if he didnt accept the plea he was facing up to 30+ years.
http://popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence-ele...
from his wiki page
On September 12, 2012, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding nine more felony counts, which increased Swartz's maximum criminal exposure to 50 years of imprisonment and $1 million in fines.
It is just extremely unusual for the imposed sentence to be at the upper bound, due to a number of factors, particularly the federal sentencing guidelines (though upward departures from the guidelines are possible, and may reach anything up to the upper bound -- that's why it is an upper bound.)
Also: do you agree with the commenter upthread who is loudly asserting that Swartz faced 30-50 years for scraping JSTOR?
Not that I am aware of, but I wouldn't necessarily expect to be aware of it unless it also happened to be a very high profile case (also, the history of the guidelines being held to be discretionary rather than mandatory is much shorter than the "entire history of computer crime" -- U.S. v. Booker, which held that the provisions making the guidelines mandatory was a violation of the Sixth Amendment, was only decided in 2005.)
> Also: do you agree with the commenter upthread who is loudly asserting that Swartz faced 30-50 years for scraping JSTOR?
With the "up to" language presented, AFAICT the 30-50 year range is accurate in that the upper bound is within that range (35 years being apparently more precisely accurate, from what I can find.)
Of course, it would not seem likely that the actual sentence would have been anywhere near the upper bound, but it was the maximum legally possible sentence. So the statement is correct, though quite likely misleading without understanding how federal sentencing works in practice.
Do you agree with him? Do you actually believe Swartz and his attorney reasonably believed he faced 30-50 years? When we consider Swartz's predicament, or really the predicament of anyone faced with federal charges, should we assume that sentences will not group, regardless of what the guidelines say? Is the "30 years" top-line sentence useful to our discussion?
No, I'm not. I directly answered both as to the accuracy of the "up to" statement (stating that that statement is, stricly speaking, accurate) and its likely relevance to actual sentencing (stating also that is misleading in the absence of an understanding of how federal sentencing works.)
> For instance, in his most recent comment, he suggested that Swartz's political activism made the longer sentence likely.
That's a different claim than the one you asked me if I agreed with. FWIW, I've done no study myself and aware of none that gives any basis for saying what effect, if any, political activism has on sentencing decisions (my intuition is that crimes related motivated by it probably are correlated with a lack of remorse shown and negatively correlated with factors -- both within the guidelines and that judges are likely to apply in considering outside the guidelines -- that favor mitigation of sentences, so the idea that it does lead to greater sentences is intuitively plausible.)
> He was strongly implying that the 30-50 year sentence DOJ bragged about was anchored in reality.
And I directly addressed the connection between that and reality.
> Do you agree with him?
Asked and answered. Repeatedly, at this point.
> When we consider Swartz's predicament, or really the predicament of anyone faced with federal charges, should we assume that sentences will not group, regardless of what the guidelines say?
We should assume that there is the potential for that to occur, yes, particularly if we are the ones facing them. Any other assumption in a post-Booker world is imprudent.
As to the likelihood of upward departures, what assumptions we should make depends on the available information we have on cases that are similar, and what judges have done and appeals courts have allowed or not in the way of upward departures. But the history of the guidelines being advisory is short, and in many cases there aren't much in the way of similar cases from which to form much of a judgement about that probability.
> Is the "30 years" top-line sentence useful to our discussion?
I don't think raising the Swartz case (upper-bound sentence or otherwise) is particularly useful in the context of the Bitcoin case.
In fact: since you seem to be a kind of nerd that is very similar to the kind I am, I'll bet you've actually read the relevant sentencing guidelines --- not just the table, but the big document that lists all the criteria that add points to CFAA and wire fraud charges. If I had to guess about what's in your mind, I'd guess you agree with me: the prosecution's threatened 7 year sentence was also mostly bluster.
It's not entirely fictitious. Unlikely, but totally realistic and totally legal.
That's debatable.
i dont know
His situation was akin to you waking up one day and finding, out of nowhere, a letter in the mail telling you to come in for a 6-month jail time.
I assume that would not be a happy and acceptable morning for you, would it?
A geek was making scientific research publicly and digitally accessible. Try to personally connect to that by telling yourself how similar that is to you doing your own hobby i your spare time. Your argument says you'd be happy to have 6 months in jail for doing your own thing. (Taking such a deal requires pleading guilty to a crime.)
That's a complete misrepresentation. A reasonable person might expect there to be consequences for breaking into a closet while hiding your face from security cameras in order to retrieve a covertly installed laptop you put there to evade a network ban. That is not "out of nowhere". I'd even say it doesn't resemble my hobbies in the least.
Aaron Swartz was never sentenced. Popularly quoted was the a "up to" sentence taken by adding the maximum penalties for each of the crimes he was charged with, as is typical with both DoJ presentations and news articles about potential sentences (for related reasons, as both have an interest in maximizing the perceived cost -- DoJ to motivate plea deals, news media to create drama), but real sentencing rarely looks anything like those maximums.
Comparing an actual sentence for one party that pled guilty to the theoretical maximum for another party based on the set of charges they got is no way to evaluate fairness, since its not comparing apples to apples.