It’s okay to get caught (from a risk, not a moral perspective), it’s whether it was worth it after the costs (time and money) are tallied. Doesn’t make you dumb, it’s always a calculated risk if you’re considering a crime.
LLCs aren't protected against bankruptcies. The protection they offer only goes the other way: if someone gets a $170 million judgement against an LLC you own, that liability (usually) does not extend to assets you personally own.
In this case, any (share in) LLCs he may own would be part of the assets, together with shares/cars/cash/etc., subject to be auctioned off with the proceeds being divided among his creditors.
> Federal prosecutors are also seeking three years of supervised release and an agreed-upon restitution payment of nearly $756,500 to Alphabet Inc’s self-driving car company Waymo
> Levandowski filed for bankruptcy protection in March, shortly after a court confirmed that he must pay $179 million to Google to end a legal battle over his split from the Alphabet Inc unit.
I see is guilty of a few things, but the size of the fines seems astronomical. Does the scope of his crime justify this punishment?
Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Almost all engineers should at least know that doing so is wrong. And this guy was an executive, not just an engineer.
I'm not suggesting that it's an excuse or that engineers don't know it's wrong, just that I'm guessing most of them don't know they can go to jail for pulling this shit.
It's kind of like what happened with Aaron Schwartz (where the ethics of what he did might be more debatable than Levandowski). I don't think either of these smart people realized what they were doing could put them in prison.
- 14,000 highly confidential and proprietary design files for Waymo’s various hardware systems, including designs of Waymo’s LiDAR and circuit board
- 9.7 GB of Waymo’s highly confidential files and trade secrets, including blueprints, design files and testing documentation.
- supplier lists, manufacturing details and statements of work with highly technical information
> Levandowski admitted to taking a single spreadsheet called “Chauffeur TL Weekly Updates — Q4 2015.” According to court documents, the file contained quarterly goals and weekly metrics and the objectives and key results for Levandowski’s team. It also included a summary of technical challenges the
team faced and some that had been overcome.
Honest question here. Why are we, the taxpayers, paying for 27 months of free housing and food for this guy?
Considering he's not a physical threat to society, only an intellectual one, I'd much rather he be slapped with a financial punishment large enough to be meaningful.
> Honest question here. Why are we, the taxpayers, paying for 27 months of free housing and food for this guy?
That's a great point, he should be sent to work in the uranium mines of Kamchatka to earn his keep for those 27 months.
The non-snarky answer is 'because sentencing in this country is a mixture of rehabilitation, punishment, and public safety', with a very heavy emphasis on punishment. (And quite frankly, I could think of more sympathetic persons and sentences to raise your question in defense of.)
Q: Why do we (or should be) putting rapists, thieves, murderers behind bars?
A: Because I'm happy to chip in and pay for their locked-up housing and food to make sure that they're not on the streets hurting people.
But this guy? I don't give a damn about him. He's not a threat to me, my company, or anything I'm involved with, and I shouldn't be paying for his punishment or rehabilitation costs.
If this guy walked past my home at night I wouldn't give a damn. If Brock Turner came anywhere near my home or friends' homes I'd be scared. Which of the two really should be behind bars? Why is this harmless-to-me guy being locked for 27 months at MY expense but Brock Turner getting 6 months?
So let's say I did the same thing. I don't have any money, so there is no meaningful financial punishment that can be applied to me. In which case, we'll need an alternate punishment, ie - jail.
In which case we've just set up a punishment system where poor people go to jail and rich people don't.
OK, so require community service. That doesn't cost me as a taxpayer, and even benefits me indirectly. Community service is also a far better rehabilitation strategy than locking people up when they aren't a physical threat.
Or delayed financial punishments that are proportional to your earnings in the future.
>In which case we've just set up a punishment system where poor people go to jail and rich people don't.
One could make a good case that this is already the state of the justice system in the United States. The simple act of being able to afford a better attorney alters the outcome of a trial.
That’s the difference between American view of prison as only punishment and deterrent and not rehabilitation.
If a criminal is violent and needs to isolated from society or needs rehabilitation programs skills training etc to live a moral /legal life then perhaps prison can offer those .
Even with traditional non white collar crimes , like say prostitution or small drug dealers offender are often victims as well , putting them in prison is counter productive.
The punishment philosophy is based on the premise that punishment is an deterrent and severe punishment will make people not break the law. This is outdated view.
Decision making when committing a crime is not driven by fear of imprisonment. People do not always make rational decisions , especially under the influence of a substance . our risk perception and tolerance is not statistically optimal plenty of games and tv shows revolve around this .
Logical reasoning arguments aside , on pure numbers rate of incarceration and convictions, recidivism per capita in the U.S. is by far the highest in developed economies and the difference is very stark compared to say Norway where rehabilitation is the focus, famously prisons are so empty they rent it out to other countries, a mass shooter complains about not having access to latest play station.
I am not even touching on the problems with the slavery , for profit incentives , the dis proportionate racial representation , racial /economic sentencing biases for similar crimes in the U.S.
> “It is, unfortunately, no exaggeration to say that a prison sentence today can amount to the imposition of a serious health crisis, even a death sentence, given the BOP’s (Federal Bureau of Prisons) current inability to control the spread of the coronavirus,”
Not a huge exaggeration - but I'd like to see some explanation of why that's in any way relevant to the trial.
Maybe the DOJ should be requesting funds from congress to help improve prison safety or even look at upscaling work-release programs - or maybe the executive branch could pardon all those low level drug offenders and the DOJ could finally remove mandatory sentencing rules around possession charges. Maybe in this virus world centralized prisons aren't morally acceptable and we need to look at smaller more integrated facilities for all but the max-security folks.
But it doesn't matter for this dude's case, it's completely irrelevant. He can take on the same risks that society deems appropriate for black kids who had a joint behind their ear.
(edit: As I noted in a response actually yea, it is a huge exaggeration so I don't disagree with the parent's point. I still personally prefer to tear down the BS from the angle I noted above but yea the lawyer's numbers are also totally BS)
If we consider p(him dying) = 1 if convicted to a death sentence. The point of the lawyer if that p(him getting covid in prison) * p(him dying of covid as a healthy 40 year old) ≈ 1.
If it's not a huge exaggeration, please run me through the numbers.
Because p(him dying of covid as a healthy 40 year old) < 0.015
I would love to pay those attorney's fee with few lottery tickets if that's how this guy plays with statistics.
That's fair yea - so I think there a few ways this lawyer's statements can be proven to be nonsense.
The numbers in that formulary are mostly unknown so I'd be more comfortable attacking the statement from the angle I outlined above but I agree the numbers clearly don't match what the lawyer is implying.
> He can take on the same risks that society deems appropriate for black kids who had a joint behind their ear.
I spent 10 years incarcerated in TDCJ, and I don't appreciate you spreading falsehoods like this. There are a lot of reasons that people go to prison, and a very small number claim to be innocent (and some are, I just don't know which ones). But I never met anyone who was down for just a joint. Maybe if the joint constituted a violation of probation for aggravated robbery or statutory rape or something like that, but never for just a joint.
Most of you who talk like this don't even know the people that you think are so oppressed. It's no surprise that you complain about imaginary problems while being completely ignorant of the real issues.
This is a great example of unequal prosecution. A startup that has its IP copied illegally would be lucky to not be ignored by the feds. Even if it was the proximate cause of a startup’s failure (which is admittedly rare).
But for Google and Goldman Sachs which never suffer any real damage in these cases, the feds are their private army capable of raiding and imprisoning anyone who copies some files illegally, even if they suffer no actual harm whatsoever.
There is no question Google should be able to use the law to stop someone from using their IP illegally and be compensated for any damages. But this attempt to make an example out of someone just because they’re powerful is despicable.
The combination of powerful corporations with vendettas and prosecutors out to make their bones is a huge flaw in our system.
Huh? The alternative is the prosecutor is required to prosecute everything crime cops bring to them, no matter the evidence or likelihood of conviction.
It is comparable to bueracratic systems vs "feudal" appointees with discretion. Despite the inefficiency, inflexibility, and occasional stupidity from bueracracies historically they have been an improvement especially for scalability. Essentially removing discretion would "bueracraticize" it compared to a more fiefdom style prosecutorial discretion.
There is some potential long term improvement of forcing legislators to write their laws better at the cost of far greater court load, travesties of justice, and similiar in exchange for lessened corruption. The improvemrnt part rests upon assumptions of outrage over the proper thing. Not the best of track records given dumb knee-jerk laws.
So yeah, almost certainly worse short term but it may be better long term. Not exactly an inspiring cause.
I am not defending "formalism", as you appear to suggest by "required to prosecute everything cops bring to them". One uses discretion to help their cronies--mostly super wealthy and powerful.
IP infringement is typically a civil offense, not a criminal one. What Lewandowski allegedly did was corporate espionage, which is a crime, and a different and much more serious offense than merely illegal copying someone's IP.
Yes but it's probably really hard to prove these kinds of cases. However, Google appears to have had a large volume of evidence that would be really hard to overcome, so the prosecution has a really easy time.
With a lot of smaller companies, it's very likely that it would be a nightmare to try and prosecute and the evidence would be a lot thinner. So you are looking at an unequal outcome because the security practices of Google are probably orders of magnitude higher than any small company.
I mean, these kind of white collar crimes are hardly prosecuted at all, I can't even think of a criminal prosecution like this. I have heard of some civil cases similar to this, but very few that result in actual criminal charges. The only criminal cases I can remember, are from state actors getting caught trying to steal from corporations and then leave the country.
While this is a fair point (due to the difference in money), there is something to be said about the trauma imposed on people who are witness to a bank robbery, not to mention the potential lives hurt/lost if things go sour. I'm not saying in your above example that the 27mo and 10yr sentences should be shorter or longer, I'm just noting that there are reasons the two aren't equal.
I think armed robbery sentences depend on whether it was the first time or this is far down the list of incidents (also rap sheet might have a history of other things), but a fist time non violent robber probably will not get ten years in the klink, though you could if the judge and prosecutor impose maximums.
Most states consider “no priors” in sentencing guidelines.
Fair point, but the penalties for white collar crime are still very lax even when "everyday" people are affected. Look at the last recession which led to many "average" american families losing their homes. That wasn't possible without fraud especially the ratings agencies that were giving out false ratings and still no one went to prison.
Yes I agree with you there. There are a whole host of blue collar crimes that have too high a penalty as well. I'm not saying don't change the sentences. Just noting the difference. I personally tried to convince multiple people that insider trading should be illegal and prosecuted (example of white collar crime that is hard to pinpoint someone who suffers directly). Between libertarian-minded people and very left-wing people, it's hard to convince some people I know that want to eliminate prisons (left) or regulations (libertarians), that we should be handing out penalties for certain things, let alone stiffer penalties. Prosecute fraud? I'm with you on that!
> If you are convicted of misdemeanor grand theft, you face up to 364 days in county jail and a maximum fine of $1,000. If you are convicted of felony grand theft, you face a sentence of 16 months, two or three years in county jail and maximum fine of $10,000[1]
Courts have ruled that robbery is not necessarily violent. If you walk into a bank and say "Excuse me, could I trouble you for a moment of your time? Please hand me all the money in the safe", that's not violent: no threat is made, no gun is brandished, and so on. (It is still a robbery, of course.)
Are you being facetious? Because that is the biggest load of crap I've heard. There is no such thing as a non-violent bank robbery. The only reason why a bank teller would acquiesce to the demand, as polite as it is, is because there is a threat of violence. If the teller was guaranteed that no violence would occur if they denied the request, they would tell the would-be-robber to take a hike.
There is, and if both took $10k the violent crime deserves a harsher punishment. But when 18,000x the money is taken, there is a fair bit of hurt for a fair few people.
We live in a dyslexic era. On one end, you have people trying to argue that there is an incarceration crisis in the country and call for reforms to reduce prison sentences for non-violent offenders ... on the other end, if you read a story about a white-collar criminal, people want to increase prison sentences. Which is it?
I think it can be both without being contradictory.
Changing what gets you prison time with a resulting overall decrease in the prison population is possible.
Lol. Those that do actually succeed in robbing a bank get away with far less than $10,000. There will be a dye pack if you grab anything more than what the cashier has in front of them. It is most often less than $1000.
Re: peer comments noting the difference between violent & non-violent crime. The penal code is full of blue-collar crimes that carry exceedingly stiff penalties.
For example, possession of 12 grams of LSD carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years under federal sentencing guidelines.
This is also why you should NOT attempt to dissolve drugs into drinks if you're caught with them... because they can use the liquid weight of the drink as your charged amount.
This seems like something an even mildly competent lawyer could get you off of. If a chemical is solid at room temperature, it definitely cannot be a liquid at 100% concentration.
To clarify, you are assuming (a big if since the poster made no mention of this) that 12g includes the weight of the paper and if you were to discount that weight then you would get a lesser amount of LSD? i.e. If the paper weighs 11 g then the actual LSD amount would be 1g.
It's not a big if, this is standard practice in the US legal system. They weigh the drug + medium. If you have 1-9 grams, including the paper, minimum first offender sentence is 5 years. With the paper that's only a few doses.
so the impurities/media are considered to be the drug as well as substance itself. Im not very confident with the idea that 1gram of pure crystaline LSD would bring a lesser sentence than a sheet of blotter with one drop on it.
it seems the war on drugs has caused more brain damage than any recreational drug. This is similar to stunts like draining the drizzle from beer cans into one empty can and declaring an open alcoholic beverage was concealed in a vehicle. LEOs can have thier respect back when they stop this sort of nonsense.
Yes, that's the claim (which seems supported elsewhere in the thread).
You are probably underestimating the magnitude of the effect, though. A single square of blotter paper weighs on the order of 10 mg; it holds a dose on the order of 50-100 micrograms, about 1% of the paper mass.
Having been myself on grand juries for drug prosecution and subsequently reading more about the process, this is not just a baseless assumption. Including carrier weight is SOP from police+DA for drug charges, and they're not upfront about that fact when talking to the jury. When they say "X grams of Y" what they always mean is "X grams of thing containing Y" which could mean anywhere from X grams of Y to X femtograms of Y in tablets that are mostly chalk. They do this because the legal code isn't specific about measuring active ingredients[see edit] and they are universally incentivized to elevate the charge.
[edit] To clarify, I mean that the law does not say specifically to weigh only the active ingredients. In fact it's the opposite.
In theory, the defense attorney would provide a counter-balance to this- unfortunately, our system does not provide adequate defense to folks who can't afford it. And that is the real tragedy, methinks.
According to the below linked case, 5.7 grams, including th e paper, was 1,000 doses. So 12 grams probably closer to 2,000 doses, depending on the weight of the paper. (https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/500/453/)
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that being in possession of 48,000 good strong doses of LSD would seem like a fairly good reason to assume the person is somewhat organised in their criminal leanings.
Calling it blue collar is somewhat of a stretch.
Whether I agree with the spirit of the law in that context is somewhat orthogonal.
Full disclosure: many years ago I moved about 33,000 tabs of LSD on to the streets, took me about three years though.
Uh, that's only if you think they are worth $179M. I might be your competitor, think your software is crap, and worth $0 to me. This is a heavily subjective number.
$10000 in hard cash though is $10000 no matter how you look at it.
I do agree that white vs blue collar crime is an issue but I don't think that's the issue here.
On the other hand though I am dismayed at the fact that this guy is getting more jail time than rapists often get (e.g. Brock Turner). Although it's still a crime, I don't consider intellectual property crime to be that serious in the grand scheme of things. Intellectual property is not even real property to me, and real property is a far cry from human bodies.
Interesting, can pure money be treated as virtual goods? and reversing that crime must be easy, no? Like banks reversing those transactions, or invalidating the stolen records and re-allocating funds to affected clients?
Let’s say an employee working for Bank A developed software there. Left Bank A to work for Bank B. Brought his software with him. Bank B has had to spend less money to develop that software and is more profitable had their employee not stolen the code. Bank A and Bank B are competitors. How much would this be considered theft?
B: I steal the blueprints to your house. You still have a house, but you paid for an architect and I didn't.
B still sucks, but almost everyone agrees A is much worse. And that's why if you steal $20m from a bank, the sentence is much worse than if you copy software that a bank spent $20m to develop.
The architect may not agree with you. He was personally impacted. It’s a matter of upholding intellectual property. I suspect the rampant justification of music pirating from the early 2000s has caused people to have defective morality circuits.
Caught spray-painting a federal building in political protest? (Which costs less than a hundred dollars to clean up.) Prosecutors were seeking ten years for that adventure.
Actual sentencing was probably a bit less than a year, but I likewise doubt Lewandowski will serve all 27 months.
There is no comparison to be made here. I know people who have been on the receiving end of a bank robbery and the trauma is long lasting. Is google traumatized by their experience? Do they tense up when someone walks into the office wearing a hat or a pair of sunglasses? These two crimes are very different things.
Edit: To those downvoting, do you honestly believe robbing a bank is a victimless crime? Someone has to be on the receiving end of that robbery and it is harmful to that person regardless of your feelings towards banks in general.
One might say, spreading the IP so that it doesn't belong to a single monopoly is a good thing for the society in general - jail time for this sounds ridiculous.
I see that as a misread of the truth behind the second comment. The comment is in relation to "A startup that has its IP copied illegally would be lucky to not be ignored by the feds."
The first comment references unfair leniency in relation to the person doing the crime.
The second references unjust application only in favor of the powerful.
Those are not the same dimensions and are not comparable.
It's kinda funny how the both the criticisms of the punishment as being too strict and too lenient are being constructed from the same left-leaning perspective.
1. It's inequitable that white collar criminals face lower sentences than blue collar criminals despite the nominal values involved being way higher
2. It's inequitable that people are being threatened with years in prison for non-violent property crimes against mega corporations.
I think there are a few different angles here for it being too strict.
1. There's are large elements of randomness and bias in our legal system which make it incredibly uncertain if someone will go to jail for a crime they commit, and sentences are given at times months to years after a crime is committed. This means long sentences provide only marginally more disincentive than a shorter sentence.
2. It is incredibly expensive to imprison people, so we should aim to keep people jailed for the smallest amount of time necessary to protect society and/or deter crime.
3. It is simply inhumane to put any non-violent person in jail for a quarter century.
4. Corporatism incentivizes this kind of crime and society should address the root of the problem rather than focus on people who respond to the perverse incentives of systems we live in.
He was so brazen in using identical schematic and suppliers. It amazing to think all this is a result of the supplier getting confused from having two clients with identical schematics and accidently cc'ing the wrong engineers.
I was thinking I'd read that the head of the Uber self-driving car division at the time of the killing of Elaine Herzberg [1] is being pursued by prosecutors for her wrongful death.
From what I see in a cursory search, the back-up driver Rafaela Vasquez of the self-driving car that killed Elaine Herzberg was looking at their phone most of the time, which led to the fatal crash. I can't seem to find anything about this person being charged with anything. IANAL: Would this not be involuntary manslaughter at least?
So nice that they’ve decided this is what they want to go after the self-driving division of Uber for, and not the gross negligence that led to a woman’s death when their car plowed into her walking a bike across the street.
> “It is, unfortunately, no exaggeration to say that a prison sentence today can amount to the imposition of a serious health crisis, even a death sentence, given the BOP’s (Federal Bureau of Prisons) current inability to control the spread of the coronavirus,” Levandowski’s attorneys wrote.
I find this ridiculous for his attorneys to use as a defense against his potential incarceration. While likely true (and certainly deplorable on its own), this applies to anyone going through the criminal justice system and Levandowski is no special case. Conditions in prison should hardly be an excuse for house arrest vs incarceration.
I dunno, if I was fighting for my freedom I sure would hope my attorneys do everything (legal) in their power to assist in my defense. Ridiculous or not it's a valid concern.
Whole it may be ridiculous, he is doing his job in trying to get his client of and our a weaker sentence. And yeah, any lawyer today woukd be making the same argument.
Keep in mind, the constitution prohibits unusual and unjust punishment. So, or choose, conditions in prison should be brought up... By any good lawyer, at any time.
I agree the lawyer is doing the right thing for his role - perhaps I should have phrased as "ridiculous for this argument to be taken seriously" or some such.
Not ridiculous at all. He has been sentenced to jail, not to be infected with Covid. Whether in jail he has a higher risk of getting is a very legit defense strategy. Covid can be a life-or-death virus. Nothing is harmed by having him report to jail next year for example.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadMy question is, how is he paying his (presumably very expensive) lawyers?
In this case, any (share in) LLCs he may own would be part of the assets, together with shares/cars/cash/etc., subject to be auctioned off with the proceeds being divided among his creditors.
If you do shady business, you have to have plan B.
> Levandowski filed for bankruptcy protection in March, shortly after a court confirmed that he must pay $179 million to Google to end a legal battle over his split from the Alphabet Inc unit.
I see is guilty of a few things, but the size of the fines seems astronomical. Does the scope of his crime justify this punishment?
He was a high level exec at Waymo, who stole the IP which represented the core competency just before he jumped ship to Uber.
I don't know about "consider," he plead guilty to theft of trade secrets and was charged with crimes defined by the Economic Espionage Act.
But I think most engineers don't know that stealing IP from your former employer is a federal crime punishable up to 10 years.
It's kind of like what happened with Aaron Schwartz (where the ethics of what he did might be more debatable than Levandowski). I don't think either of these smart people realized what they were doing could put them in prison.
- 14,000 highly confidential and proprietary design files for Waymo’s various hardware systems, including designs of Waymo’s LiDAR and circuit board - 9.7 GB of Waymo’s highly confidential files and trade secrets, including blueprints, design files and testing documentation. - supplier lists, manufacturing details and statements of work with highly technical information
> Levandowski admitted to taking a single spreadsheet called “Chauffeur TL Weekly Updates — Q4 2015.” According to court documents, the file contained quarterly goals and weekly metrics and the objectives and key results for Levandowski’s team. It also included a summary of technical challenges the team faced and some that had been overcome.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/press-release/file/1197991...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/03/19/levando...
TL;DR he stole lidar and plead down to a lesser charge.
Considering he's not a physical threat to society, only an intellectual one, I'd much rather he be slapped with a financial punishment large enough to be meaningful.
That's a great point, he should be sent to work in the uranium mines of Kamchatka to earn his keep for those 27 months.
The non-snarky answer is 'because sentencing in this country is a mixture of rehabilitation, punishment, and public safety', with a very heavy emphasis on punishment. (And quite frankly, I could think of more sympathetic persons and sentences to raise your question in defense of.)
Q: Why do we (or should be) putting rapists, thieves, murderers behind bars?
A: Because I'm happy to chip in and pay for their locked-up housing and food to make sure that they're not on the streets hurting people.
But this guy? I don't give a damn about him. He's not a threat to me, my company, or anything I'm involved with, and I shouldn't be paying for his punishment or rehabilitation costs.
If this guy walked past my home at night I wouldn't give a damn. If Brock Turner came anywhere near my home or friends' homes I'd be scared. Which of the two really should be behind bars? Why is this harmless-to-me guy being locked for 27 months at MY expense but Brock Turner getting 6 months?
In which case we've just set up a punishment system where poor people go to jail and rich people don't.
OK, so require community service. That doesn't cost me as a taxpayer, and even benefits me indirectly. Community service is also a far better rehabilitation strategy than locking people up when they aren't a physical threat.
Or delayed financial punishments that are proportional to your earnings in the future.
One could make a good case that this is already the state of the justice system in the United States. The simple act of being able to afford a better attorney alters the outcome of a trial.
If a criminal is violent and needs to isolated from society or needs rehabilitation programs skills training etc to live a moral /legal life then perhaps prison can offer those .
Even with traditional non white collar crimes , like say prostitution or small drug dealers offender are often victims as well , putting them in prison is counter productive.
The punishment philosophy is based on the premise that punishment is an deterrent and severe punishment will make people not break the law. This is outdated view.
Decision making when committing a crime is not driven by fear of imprisonment. People do not always make rational decisions , especially under the influence of a substance . our risk perception and tolerance is not statistically optimal plenty of games and tv shows revolve around this .
Logical reasoning arguments aside , on pure numbers rate of incarceration and convictions, recidivism per capita in the U.S. is by far the highest in developed economies and the difference is very stark compared to say Norway where rehabilitation is the focus, famously prisons are so empty they rent it out to other countries, a mass shooter complains about not having access to latest play station.
I am not even touching on the problems with the slavery , for profit incentives , the dis proportionate racial representation , racial /economic sentencing biases for similar crimes in the U.S.
No exaggeration ? °-°
Maybe the DOJ should be requesting funds from congress to help improve prison safety or even look at upscaling work-release programs - or maybe the executive branch could pardon all those low level drug offenders and the DOJ could finally remove mandatory sentencing rules around possession charges. Maybe in this virus world centralized prisons aren't morally acceptable and we need to look at smaller more integrated facilities for all but the max-security folks.
But it doesn't matter for this dude's case, it's completely irrelevant. He can take on the same risks that society deems appropriate for black kids who had a joint behind their ear.
(edit: As I noted in a response actually yea, it is a huge exaggeration so I don't disagree with the parent's point. I still personally prefer to tear down the BS from the angle I noted above but yea the lawyer's numbers are also totally BS)
If it's not a huge exaggeration, please run me through the numbers. Because p(him dying of covid as a healthy 40 year old) < 0.015
I would love to pay those attorney's fee with few lottery tickets if that's how this guy plays with statistics.
The numbers in that formulary are mostly unknown so I'd be more comfortable attacking the statement from the angle I outlined above but I agree the numbers clearly don't match what the lawyer is implying.
I spent 10 years incarcerated in TDCJ, and I don't appreciate you spreading falsehoods like this. There are a lot of reasons that people go to prison, and a very small number claim to be innocent (and some are, I just don't know which ones). But I never met anyone who was down for just a joint. Maybe if the joint constituted a violation of probation for aggravated robbery or statutory rape or something like that, but never for just a joint.
Most of you who talk like this don't even know the people that you think are so oppressed. It's no surprise that you complain about imaginary problems while being completely ignorant of the real issues.
But for Google and Goldman Sachs which never suffer any real damage in these cases, the feds are their private army capable of raiding and imprisoning anyone who copies some files illegally, even if they suffer no actual harm whatsoever.
There is no question Google should be able to use the law to stop someone from using their IP illegally and be compensated for any damages. But this attempt to make an example out of someone just because they’re powerful is despicable.
The combination of powerful corporations with vendettas and prosecutors out to make their bones is a huge flaw in our system.
Sounds worse than what we have now.
There is some potential long term improvement of forcing legislators to write their laws better at the cost of far greater court load, travesties of justice, and similiar in exchange for lessened corruption. The improvemrnt part rests upon assumptions of outrage over the proper thing. Not the best of track records given dumb knee-jerk laws.
So yeah, almost certainly worse short term but it may be better long term. Not exactly an inspiring cause.
This guy was a grade A jerk too - if he doesn't do time then white collar crime is going to be even more unfairly under-enforced.
With a lot of smaller companies, it's very likely that it would be a nightmare to try and prosecute and the evidence would be a lot thinner. So you are looking at an unequal outcome because the security practices of Google are probably orders of magnitude higher than any small company.
I mean, these kind of white collar crimes are hardly prosecuted at all, I can't even think of a criminal prosecution like this. I have heard of some civil cases similar to this, but very few that result in actual criminal charges. The only criminal cases I can remember, are from state actors getting caught trying to steal from corporations and then leave the country.
White collar crime steal $179MM of assets and get 27 months of home arrest.
Blue collar crime rob a bank to steal $10,000 and spend 10 years in prison.
Most states consider “no priors” in sentencing guidelines.
[1] https://www.wklaw.com/theft-sentencing-punishment/
Theft (i.e. stealing without violence, as opposed to robbery) can still carry penalties of several years of prison.
https://blog.federaldefendersny.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/...
Lol. Those that do actually succeed in robbing a bank get away with far less than $10,000. There will be a dye pack if you grab anything more than what the cashier has in front of them. It is most often less than $1000.
For example, possession of 12 grams of LSD carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years under federal sentencing guidelines.
Reader's note: that's between 50k and 100k doses.
Not that I disagree with your point.
it seems the war on drugs has caused more brain damage than any recreational drug. This is similar to stunts like draining the drizzle from beer cans into one empty can and declaring an open alcoholic beverage was concealed in a vehicle. LEOs can have thier respect back when they stop this sort of nonsense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_Hogg
You are probably underestimating the magnitude of the effect, though. A single square of blotter paper weighs on the order of 10 mg; it holds a dose on the order of 50-100 micrograms, about 1% of the paper mass.
[edit] To clarify, I mean that the law does not say specifically to weigh only the active ingredients. In fact it's the opposite.
Calling it blue collar is somewhat of a stretch.
Whether I agree with the spirit of the law in that context is somewhat orthogonal.
Full disclosure: many years ago I moved about 33,000 tabs of LSD on to the streets, took me about three years though.
SCOTUS says the medium weight counts. So I'm guessing 12 grams is a lot fewer doses according to the courts?
Uh, that's only if you think they are worth $179M. I might be your competitor, think your software is crap, and worth $0 to me. This is a heavily subjective number.
$10000 in hard cash though is $10000 no matter how you look at it.
I do agree that white vs blue collar crime is an issue but I don't think that's the issue here.
On the other hand though I am dismayed at the fact that this guy is getting more jail time than rapists often get (e.g. Brock Turner). Although it's still a crime, I don't consider intellectual property crime to be that serious in the grand scheme of things. Intellectual property is not even real property to me, and real property is a far cry from human bodies.
If he had stolen the IP, and the acquiring company decided to pay $0 for it and not take it, then your assessment would be correct.
But a company decided that those assets were worth north of $100MM and paid for it.
Bernie Madoff was a white collar criminal that stole real money from clients and is serving life in prison.
Google may have been damaged, but they can still use their software that was stolen.
B: I steal the blueprints to your house. You still have a house, but you paid for an architect and I didn't.
B still sucks, but almost everyone agrees A is much worse. And that's why if you steal $20m from a bank, the sentence is much worse than if you copy software that a bank spent $20m to develop.
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2019...
Caught spray-painting a federal building in political protest? (Which costs less than a hundred dollars to clean up.) Prosecutors were seeking ten years for that adventure.
Actual sentencing was probably a bit less than a year, but I likewise doubt Lewandowski will serve all 27 months.
Edit: To those downvoting, do you honestly believe robbing a bank is a victimless crime? Someone has to be on the receiving end of that robbery and it is harmful to that person regardless of your feelings towards banks in general.
The only mention of home confinement in the OP is what the defense is asking for. The prosecution is asking for 27 months of imprisonment.
Second-top comment: unfairly strict
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23989857
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23989843
I see that as a misread of the truth behind the second comment. The comment is in relation to "A startup that has its IP copied illegally would be lucky to not be ignored by the feds."
The first comment references unfair leniency in relation to the person doing the crime.
The second references unjust application only in favor of the powerful.
Those are not the same dimensions and are not comparable.
1. It's inequitable that white collar criminals face lower sentences than blue collar criminals despite the nominal values involved being way higher
2. It's inequitable that people are being threatened with years in prison for non-violent property crimes against mega corporations.
1. There's are large elements of randomness and bias in our legal system which make it incredibly uncertain if someone will go to jail for a crime they commit, and sentences are given at times months to years after a crime is committed. This means long sentences provide only marginally more disincentive than a shorter sentence.
2. It is incredibly expensive to imprison people, so we should aim to keep people jailed for the smallest amount of time necessary to protect society and/or deter crime.
3. It is simply inhumane to put any non-violent person in jail for a quarter century.
4. Corporatism incentivizes this kind of crime and society should address the root of the problem rather than focus on people who respond to the perverse incentives of systems we live in.
Instead, it's about some IP stuff.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg
I find this ridiculous for his attorneys to use as a defense against his potential incarceration. While likely true (and certainly deplorable on its own), this applies to anyone going through the criminal justice system and Levandowski is no special case. Conditions in prison should hardly be an excuse for house arrest vs incarceration.
Does that seem like a question that should be contemplated in this case?