I see a lot of anger in the form of "she should get 10 years, it's the right thing to do".
I wonder if that's precisely the sentiment that has been part of the reason the USA has become the country with the highest % of incarcerated people. I'm not an American, so I'm wondering if there's a cultural difference here that explains the different feelings / viewpoints.
2 years + owing money to the feds + not being able to get a job: this person will suffer the consequences for her action for the rest of her life. Whether it's fair or not (I'll get to that point later), it's a huge deterrence for commiting crimes, particularly for white collar crimes like this.
Regarding the fairness of the punishment: I have zero feelings about this. The punishments should be chosen to make society work: deter future crimes, keep people that are harmful and hopefully help them change course. In this case, there's also providing incentives to cooperate.
I don't need people to suffer for stuff. If it's needed somehow for society to work, them great, but I don't feel (as many in this thread seem to feel) that long periods of suffering is needed for some reason (to appease their sense of justice? God? The victims? All of the above?). And let's be clear: the suffering in higher levels of security prison in the USA is on a whole different scale.
This is why it's a hard pill to swallow. In the worst case, unprecedented matter, this white-collar crime gets 2 years.
People, particularly poor and often black Americans, have gotten 20+ years for possession.
It stings. We're trying to go back and remedy some of those absurd punishments but still, there is a stark and obvious unfairness here. And that sucks. All we can hope is that, going forward, we treat our more vulnerable groups with more dignity. But I agree, she shouldn't face harsher punishment.
> particularly poor and often black Americans, have gotten 20+ years for possession.
Just wanted to point out how insincere/misleading of a statement that is. People in those "locked up for 20 years for drugs" circumstances universally all have decade long felonious records, have committed umpteen crimes, time after time after time, are on probation with strict requirements to not be involved in illegal activities, get yet another drug charge, and are finally given a harsh sentence after being given light sentences the last dozen times in a row.
You present it as "this normal, law abiding citizen, was caught with some drugs and just thrown in jail for 20 years". Which is demonstrably not the case and is intentionally leaving out all the other details, which is really manipulative.
You also leave out that the vast, vast, majority of that group that are caught with drugs are NOT thrown in jail for 20 years.
> This is why it's a hard pill to swallow. In the worst case, unprecedented matter, this white-collar crime gets 2 years.
> People, particularly poor and often black Americans, have gotten 20+ years for possession.
But why does Ellison need to get extra time because poor/black Americans have been treated unfairly? Fix the injustice at the root rather than "fixing" it by treating everybody equally unfairly.
I wonder if that's precisely the sentiment that has been part of the reason the USA has become the country with the highest % of incarcerated people.
You wonder? You could have done a little research and found that prisons in the US aren't filled with people that stole 11 billion dollars and got more than 2 years in prison.
Yes, a very large number of people are in prisons for stealing far far far less money. But the motivation of seeing punishment as itself a good thing rather than a thing that achieves a downstream outcome overlaps.
There are other reasons for mass incarceration in the US too (perpetuation of racial hierarchies is a big one), but "people who do bad things should just be crushed" is a key element.
White collar criminals with magnitude more body bags are not getting long periods of suffering that poorly resourced petty criminals are. I think society would work better if they, specifically got more relative to other groups, including some violent criminals.
SBF is going to get the shaft, just like many other prominent white collar criminals, like Bernie Madoff, have. The reason Ellison is getting off lightly is because she made a deal with prosecutors and gave them all they needed to build a strong case. Same happens when people in a non-white-collar criminal organisation snitch, they tend to get decent deals. The reason a low level drug dealer doesn't get that is because he has no information of value to the prosecution that he can use as leverage.
Someone is suffering more than someone else and the solution is for everyone to suffer as badly? This sounds like the worst kind of race to the bottom.
I'm also worried about what it does to those who need to do the actual work to make people suffer. It must be poison for your soul to work on making others suffer. A downward spiral.
> I wonder if that's precisely the sentiment that has been part of the reason the USA has become the country with the highest % of incarcerated people.
No. We don't have hundreds of thousands of billion-size crypto fraudsters. We do have a lot of drug users and small-time drug dealers that are in prison for drug offenses, for example. Or a lot of mentally ill people who are in prison... well, because there's no other place to put them in, really.
I am not here to argue about if US should incarcerate more or less, but certainly having a billion-dollar crypto fraudster sit in prison more than 2 years would hardly make a change in that situation. It's an exceptional crime, and people expect exceptional punishment for it. Either way, it won't make difference for hundreds of thousands of people in jail for unexceptional offenses.
Regardless of the sentence, there's only one federal prison for women above low security so she's probably going to end up somewhere cushy with no fences and work release.
I don't think the Feds do work release, they have their own industries that you can slave away at for $0.17/hr. But you are right she will go to a camp since she is non-violent and only has 2 years. It's a points system and assuming she hasn't committed any crimes prior then her points will be low enough to go to a camp.
I used to drive by this prison- for years I thought it was a country club until I asked my dad about the sign that said "Do not pick up hitchhikers" which seemed odd for a golf course.
I follow a bunch of longtime lawyers who have a lot to say about how prosecutions work in practice and it's pretty interesting. Here's what I've learned:
1. The Federal conviction rate is ~99%. Federal prosecutors don't bring charges when they aren't going to win;
2. Most prosecutions end in plea deals before they get to trial. In fact, the threat of a heavy sentence at trial is used to extract a plea deal because trials are expensive. If every defendant went to trial the entire justice system would collapse;
4. You can never predict what a jury will do or what they will focus on. It's a huge gamble but it favors the prosecution. Juries want to convict, generally;
5. In Federal court, you want to get past the trial phase and into the sentencing phase. That's where the defendant can do a lot to get a lesser sentence. In state court, it's the opposite;
6. Judges and prosecturos are aligned on their goals. Not for prosecution, necessarily. Both don't want to be overturned on appeal;
7. Appeals are a deeply unfair and drawn out process. This can be abused. If you followed the YSL trial at all, you saw the judge essentially coerce testimony and refuse to disclose the details to the defense saying there was a record that would be preserved for an appeal. That judge ultimately got removed from the case but you should know that an appeal is a much higher burden to meet than anything at trial;
8. Prosecutors want a slam dunk case. The best way is to a cooperating witness. The first person to flip, gets the best deal.
So Ellison got a sweetheart deal because she immediately flipped besides arguably being the main person responsible for losing billions of dollars. Yes, SBF allowed her access to custodial funds and for that alone he deserves to go to prison.
Judges have a lot of discretion with sentencing despite their being sentencing guidelines. It's one area where a judge's biases can really show up when similar defendants can get wildly different sentences for the same crime.
2 years does seem pretty light given the gravity of the fraud, even with being a cooperating witness. Her lawyer is alrgely responsible for that, I would guess by gaming the sentencing process. Still, I imagine there was some belief that she was simply naive or she got caught up in the fraud and wasn't really responsible.
> 2. Most prosecutions end in plea deals before they get to trial. In fact, the threat of a heavy sentence at trial is used to extract a plea deal because trials are expensive. If every defendant went to trial the entire justice system would collapse;
> 4. You can never predict what a jury will do or what they will focus on. It's a huge gamble but it favors the prosecution. Juries want to convict, generally;
And those are pretty terrible and make for an unfair system. How many people took a plea deal to avoid the risk of getting a heavy sentence by gambling with a jury, even if they were innocent?
I still don't understand why they did it. SBF came from a period as a successful trader. He didn't need to defraud people to be successful. The same thought came to me when watching the Netflix show about Madoff: his pyramid scheme was only a sideline to a successful market-making business, he could have shut it down before his losses became too great, and the losses were only going to get bigger as time went on.
Nate Silver interviewed as SBF as part of research for his book and I think the big take away from it was basically that Sam's attitude to risk was pathological - he was willing to take any sized bet that he thought was positive expected value. The obvious problem with that is that you if you continually take higher and higher risk bets it's certain that you'll eventually lose one of them.
SBF has been widely presented as a person who was constantly running these probabilistic computations and comparing expected values, but this strikes me as total horseshit that is a group invention of SBF himself and journalists who have a much more interesting story when he is a wunderkind.
I'll totally buy that he thinks about risk differently than other people, but not in some more mathematical sense.
Borrow a little from you depositors because you have sure way to make money. Then you fall short a little and now you double down etc. Rinse and repeat.
> I dont think it was greed. I think he legitimately thought he was doing the right thing, thought it was fun, and thought it was interesting.
It was absolutely greed by the original sense of the word, which isn't necessary only about money, he knew he was breaking the laws given the step he took to cover his tracks, badly, but he was very well aware of the fraud he was partaking in, it was proven during his trial.
There is the crime and then there is the cover up, or attempt at doing so.
And ever after Sam was arrested he tried to intimidate and discredit, publicly, his co-defendant. He was fully aware of the crimes he committed, he just thought he could miraculously get out of his situation on top, like a trader who just lost and still going to bet everything: that's greed.
How does she have billions of dollars to pay the fine, if not stolen from Alameda/FTX users? How much money will she have when she gets out of jail in less than 2 years?
A forfeited amount is not the same as a fine. The 11 billion also does not mean that Ellison is in possession of that amount. It's simply the amount that can be connected, directly or indirectly, to the illicit activity for which she is convicted.
I am almost positive Sam Trabucco is in witness protection somewhere waiting to testify when they eventually get Tether off the board and crater this useless scamfest excuse of an industry
For whatever reason, the current US administration seems to have decided it’s better to keep Binance and Tether around than to bring down the full force of the law. The next administration is going to be more crypto-friendly. I don’t think this is going to happen.
I have noticed them go after the entities Tether uses as intermediaries like Silvergate, then Binance, then Tron, then $TON etc so they're fighting the good fight.
My guess is when Coinbase gets "hacked" there will be enough political pressure to clean house and enough Dems in power to do it. Fingers crossed that those hacked funds will still be insufficient to fill redemption requests because that's the only way the stablecoin goes under without seizure of reserves.
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2 years + owing money to the feds + not being able to get a job: this person will suffer the consequences for her action for the rest of her life. Whether it's fair or not (I'll get to that point later), it's a huge deterrence for commiting crimes, particularly for white collar crimes like this.
Regarding the fairness of the punishment: I have zero feelings about this. The punishments should be chosen to make society work: deter future crimes, keep people that are harmful and hopefully help them change course. In this case, there's also providing incentives to cooperate.
I don't need people to suffer for stuff. If it's needed somehow for society to work, them great, but I don't feel (as many in this thread seem to feel) that long periods of suffering is needed for some reason (to appease their sense of justice? God? The victims? All of the above?). And let's be clear: the suffering in higher levels of security prison in the USA is on a whole different scale.
This is why it's a hard pill to swallow. In the worst case, unprecedented matter, this white-collar crime gets 2 years.
People, particularly poor and often black Americans, have gotten 20+ years for possession.
It stings. We're trying to go back and remedy some of those absurd punishments but still, there is a stark and obvious unfairness here. And that sucks. All we can hope is that, going forward, we treat our more vulnerable groups with more dignity. But I agree, she shouldn't face harsher punishment.
Just wanted to point out how insincere/misleading of a statement that is. People in those "locked up for 20 years for drugs" circumstances universally all have decade long felonious records, have committed umpteen crimes, time after time after time, are on probation with strict requirements to not be involved in illegal activities, get yet another drug charge, and are finally given a harsh sentence after being given light sentences the last dozen times in a row.
You present it as "this normal, law abiding citizen, was caught with some drugs and just thrown in jail for 20 years". Which is demonstrably not the case and is intentionally leaving out all the other details, which is really manipulative.
You also leave out that the vast, vast, majority of that group that are caught with drugs are NOT thrown in jail for 20 years.
> People, particularly poor and often black Americans, have gotten 20+ years for possession.
But why does Ellison need to get extra time because poor/black Americans have been treated unfairly? Fix the injustice at the root rather than "fixing" it by treating everybody equally unfairly.
You wonder? You could have done a little research and found that prisons in the US aren't filled with people that stole 11 billion dollars and got more than 2 years in prison.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024.html
This site has useful graphs but I don't see a category for stealing 11 billion dollars.
There are other reasons for mass incarceration in the US too (perpetuation of racial hierarchies is a big one), but "people who do bad things should just be crushed" is a key element.
I'm also worried about what it does to those who need to do the actual work to make people suffer. It must be poison for your soul to work on making others suffer. A downward spiral.
No. We don't have hundreds of thousands of billion-size crypto fraudsters. We do have a lot of drug users and small-time drug dealers that are in prison for drug offenses, for example. Or a lot of mentally ill people who are in prison... well, because there's no other place to put them in, really.
I am not here to argue about if US should incarcerate more or less, but certainly having a billion-dollar crypto fraudster sit in prison more than 2 years would hardly make a change in that situation. It's an exceptional crime, and people expect exceptional punishment for it. Either way, it won't make difference for hundreds of thousands of people in jail for unexceptional offenses.
SBF on the other hand... https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1av88z5/fir...
So it's Danbury, CT.
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1. The Federal conviction rate is ~99%. Federal prosecutors don't bring charges when they aren't going to win;
2. Most prosecutions end in plea deals before they get to trial. In fact, the threat of a heavy sentence at trial is used to extract a plea deal because trials are expensive. If every defendant went to trial the entire justice system would collapse;
4. You can never predict what a jury will do or what they will focus on. It's a huge gamble but it favors the prosecution. Juries want to convict, generally;
5. In Federal court, you want to get past the trial phase and into the sentencing phase. That's where the defendant can do a lot to get a lesser sentence. In state court, it's the opposite;
6. Judges and prosecturos are aligned on their goals. Not for prosecution, necessarily. Both don't want to be overturned on appeal;
7. Appeals are a deeply unfair and drawn out process. This can be abused. If you followed the YSL trial at all, you saw the judge essentially coerce testimony and refuse to disclose the details to the defense saying there was a record that would be preserved for an appeal. That judge ultimately got removed from the case but you should know that an appeal is a much higher burden to meet than anything at trial;
8. Prosecutors want a slam dunk case. The best way is to a cooperating witness. The first person to flip, gets the best deal.
So Ellison got a sweetheart deal because she immediately flipped besides arguably being the main person responsible for losing billions of dollars. Yes, SBF allowed her access to custodial funds and for that alone he deserves to go to prison.
Judges have a lot of discretion with sentencing despite their being sentencing guidelines. It's one area where a judge's biases can really show up when similar defendants can get wildly different sentences for the same crime.
2 years does seem pretty light given the gravity of the fraud, even with being a cooperating witness. Her lawyer is alrgely responsible for that, I would guess by gaming the sentencing process. Still, I imagine there was some belief that she was simply naive or she got caught up in the fraud and wasn't really responsible.
> 4. You can never predict what a jury will do or what they will focus on. It's a huge gamble but it favors the prosecution. Juries want to convict, generally;
And those are pretty terrible and make for an unfair system. How many people took a plea deal to avoid the risk of getting a heavy sentence by gambling with a jury, even if they were innocent?
I'll totally buy that he thinks about risk differently than other people, but not in some more mathematical sense.
It was absolutely greed by the original sense of the word, which isn't necessary only about money, he knew he was breaking the laws given the step he took to cover his tracks, badly, but he was very well aware of the fraud he was partaking in, it was proven during his trial.
There is the crime and then there is the cover up, or attempt at doing so.
And ever after Sam was arrested he tried to intimidate and discredit, publicly, his co-defendant. He was fully aware of the crimes he committed, he just thought he could miraculously get out of his situation on top, like a trader who just lost and still going to bet everything: that's greed.
Not sure why you added ‘probably’
The more they need an insider's testimony to make the case, find the money, and/or track the goods the better the deal can be.
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My guess is when Coinbase gets "hacked" there will be enough political pressure to clean house and enough Dems in power to do it. Fingers crossed that those hacked funds will still be insufficient to fill redemption requests because that's the only way the stablecoin goes under without seizure of reserves.