Critically, he is not going to jail for intentionally crashing the plane. He is being jailed "for obstructing a federal investigation by deliberately destroying the wreckage of an airplane." Had he cooperated, it's plausible to see him getting away with a license revocation and fine. Instead he did this: "In the weeks following the plane crash, Jacob lied to investigators that he did not know the wreckage’s location.…
Was the federal investigation already underway before he enacted his plan to cover it up? Or does it not matter. When does an investigation formally start? When they heard about the fake crash like everyone else did when it went viral on youtube?
He deserves a much longer sentence for this. There is so much risk of killing someone or damaging property. Even in a remote area you cannot be sure there is nothing below or that you won’t start a forest fire. I’ve seen less bad crimes get years.
Lots of things that could harm or kill someone just get a small fine. For example, going 5 mph over the speed limit has likely killed many people over the decades, yet it's still only a $100 ticket or so.
Guess some people like to play the odds. Rather than take 50% damage, they choose to gamble between 0% damage (cover up successful) and 100% damage (cover up failed and isn’t survivable) - they are equivalent in terms of expected value.
But they're not necessarily equivalent. If option a (0% damage) is equiprobable with option b (100% damage), then yeah, the expectation value is 50% damage. But if option b is 4 times more likely than option a, then the expectation value is 80% (1/5 *0 + 4/5*100 = 80). It's that misapprehension of the probabilities that is the error of the person failing to coverup a crime. Just because there are only two possible ou…
There are three outcomes in this hypothetical: don’t bother with the cover up (50% damage); successful cover up (0% damage); and failed cover up (100% damage). So the calculation is a bit more complicated.
I doubt anyone does any jail time for stealing bread unless they are habitual offender(multiple felony convictions) or its aggravated theft(eg: by force/violence). Court cases are public so feel free to prove me wrong.
Todd Hutchinson (bread, candy, and a radio -- U.S.A), Elkeno Wallace (hot dog buns -- Bahamas), Jean Valjean (self-evident), numerous gulag victims (see: Solzhenitsyn), unnamed father who got his hand and foot chopped off for stealing a bag of flour in Syria, etc.
> Jean Valjean (self-evident)
Jean Valjean is a character in a novel, not a real person, and is about as relevant to this discussion as a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk.
Critically, he is not going to jail for intentionally crashing the plane. He is being jailed "for obstructing a federal investigation by deliberately destroying the wreckage of an airplane." Had he cooperated, it's plausible to see him getting away with a license revocation and fine. Instead he did this: "In the weeks following the plane crash, Jacob lied to investigators that he did not know the wreckage’s location.…
> Had he cooperated, it's plausible to see him getting away with a license revocation and fine. Reminder of the quotation from Howard Baker (R-TN): “It is almost always the cover-up rather than the event that causes trouble.” Though some would disagree: > There's this old line the wise folks in Washington have that 'it's not the crime, but the cover-up.' > But only fools believe that. It's always about the crime. The…
I think you're misinterpreting it a bit. Yes, the covered-up thing is usually bad enough that there's an incentive to conceal it, but it's the efforts at concealment that often end up drawing attention to the perpetrator. Absent those, many crimes would either not be investigated so thoroughly or talked down to less significance with a 'so what' or 'I didn't think it was illegal/a big deal' response (this happens a lot in politics nowadays). Covering up some incriminating action implicitly admits that the action was known to be bad, making it impossible to downplay after discovery.
Steal a loaf of bread, do hard time. Steal $5 here and there millions of times over from unsuspecting customers with completely made-up junk fees, and it's an FTC fine...after years of haggling in court. The magic of indirection!
Nobody does hard time for stealing a loaf of bread, but sure keep ranting..
3rd strike law?
I knew someone that did 14 days for stealing a frozen chicken. Repeat offender...the judge may have been fed up for all the other crap from previous and decided to go full max.
Legal fees alone are going to be many times YouTube revenue. Add lost wages for a half year in prison. Add future lost revenue from sponsors who don't want to be associated with this, and it has to be a huge financial disaster.
Even if the legal fees weren't many times the revenue, I never understood why couldn't the justice system default to fines like "All income arising out of crime + $XYZ" for all crimes, so that the fine is never a cost of doing business?
I thought that was what criminal forfeiture laws were supposed to be about. Is there are reason why they aren't routinely applied in cases like this? Seems to be a much more productive use than typical civil forfeiture.
Perhaps laziness? Determining which profits are due to a crime could be difficult to separate from legitimate activity. That said, they could write the law to claw back anything that's easily accounted for, and just use some approximations when that's impractical.
It doesn't even need to be an exact or accurate accounting of money made due to crime. The legal system could impose fines high enough to hurt regardless of where the money came from, and pretty much everyone agrees that they should because otherwise fines are just a cost of doing business. The fact that the legal system refuses to do that when it's so obvious that not doing it is harmful to everyone except criminal…
The technical term for it is "disgorgement" and it does exist in some contexts. I agree it is shockingly absent in far too many.
> the whole point of the cover-up is a recognition that a full revelation of the underlying bad act is not survivable There are numerous counter-examples to this claim. In many cases, it's obvious because the cover-up is of a civil infraction.
Isn’t the Martha Stewart insider trading story one of these counter examples?
Martha Stewart was never convicted for insider trading. This is a common mistake people make.
She was found guilty of
conspiracy to obstruct, of obstruction of an agency proceeding, and of making false statements.