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Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

cnn.com

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Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#231

SBF is 32 years old - 25 years isn't a death sentence for him Parole is available after 1/3 of term, realistically he won't serve 100% There's still a chance for him to get something out of his life post jail

IIRC it was federal, where you need to do 2/3, no?

85%

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#233

To put this into its proper perspective, see table 7 here: https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu... In 2022, the average murderer in the Federal Southern District of New York (N = 58) was sentenced to a median of 231 months, which comes out to 19 years and change. No crime of any type had an mean or median sentence higher than 25 years; most were far less than half. So it should be really hard…

> If anything, it's excessive if you consider the nature of the crime relative to the nature of murder or kidnapping. I suspect the resulting number of shortened lives amongst all the people who lost $8 billion worth of their money due to the fraud is more than the number caused by a single murder.

I thought the “lost” money was simply due to poor accounting and actually found.

> Kaplan said he had found that FTX customers lost $8 billion, FTX's equity investors lost $1.7 billion, and that lenders to the Alameda Research hedge fund Bankman-Fried founded lost $1.3 billion.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-bankman-fried-be-sent...

Clearly the real crime is bilking investors out of their money. It’s also questionable whether they even ended up losing money given the rising price of crypto in the past year. It’s also interesting how this happened:

> when it filed for bankruptcy after traders pulled $6 billion from the platform in three days and rival exchange Binance abandoned a rescue deal.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/bankrupt-crypto-exchange-...

So basically the traders did a bank run and Sam ended up going to jail. It’s interesting that by contrast SVB leaders didn’t face any repercussions because they were part of the established ways of doing things even though that ended up being very costly for the government.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#235

SBF is 32 years old - 25 years isn't a death sentence for him Parole is available after 1/3 of term, realistically he won't serve 100% There's still a chance for him to get something out of his life post jail

IIRC it was federal, where you need to do 2/3, no?

85%, not 2/3.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#236
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone isn't a violent threat to society, there isn't much social benefit to keeping folks locked up longer then 20-ish years. 20-25 (assuming he gets the 15% off for good behavior the feds allow) is plenty.

There had to be some scale or additive nature though. If an otherwise peaceful person is committing fraud on a scale 1000 times larger than the next guy, wouldn’t it at least scale up logarithmically?

Actually, financial fraud sentencing guidelines add an extra number of years to the sentence that grows by the log of the money stolen: https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/guidelines-manu...

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25 years is a damn long time. I don’t know how that can “seem low”.

I think it seems low because of the magnitude of the crime. Also because we punish more violent crimes with very harsh sentences including charging non-violent perpetrators with violent crimes(Felony Murder). Add in the desire to be seen as doing something with sentencing inflation and your get multiple hundred year sentences. At first I felt that 25 years was short but thinking about it, he will be ~60 when he gets…

if he does 85% and after accounting for the year and a half he’s already been in prison he’ll probably get out by 50

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#240

[flagged]

It will be interesting to see if they now prosecute his parents, who were entirely, shamelessly complicit.

Why do you think that? From everything I've read, they had no idea what was going on, they just put their names on things because their son asked them to. If anything their crime was not being inquisitive enough to ask why.
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