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.
SBF on the other hand... https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1av88z5/fir...
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.
If the justice department was doing their job, and justice is blind... all of us?
A lot of us have blown more years of our lives, in worse environments, to hang on for four-year vesting schedules.
For example, Martha Stewart was in prison, but has never lost a step in her empire.
FOUND:
>> Late Monday, Ellison’s attorneys in a court filing said they had finalized financial settlements with prosecutors and the FTX debtor’s estate.
>> The filing did not say how much she would pay in those settlements, which are separate from the forfeiture order, but it was already known that Ellison’s $10 million in shares in the AI startup Anthropic, which have grown substantially since she first bought them, provide the bulk value of her settlements.
Seems like a situation that just got worse and worse until it was a disaster without remediation.
Meanwhile SBF was quite happy to watch the world burn.
> Prosecutors did not recommend a specific sentence for Ms. Ellison, but they filed a memo to Judge Kaplan praising her “exemplary” cooperation with the government. Her lawyers requested that she serve no prison time.
> “I have seen a lot of cooperators. I have never seen one like Ms. Ellison,” Judge Kaplan said before announcing the sentence. “What she said on the stand was very incriminating of herself, and she pulled no punches about it.”
> Judge Kaplan said the difference between Ms. Ellison and Mr. Bankman-Fried was that “she cooperated and he denied the whole thing.”
We knew her sentence would be light back during SBF's trial because she was a key witness in that case. The prosecutors traded her sentence for his.
What strange sad details. And absolutely baffling inclusions in this article and in this court case, compared to something like
> Since her guilty plea, Ms. Ellison has struggled to find paying work, according to the memo her lawyers filed. At one point, the memo said, she had secured a position helping low-income families with their taxes, only to have the offer revoked after the employer realized who she was.
which has an obvious angle and story it's trying to sell
Almost makes it worth having a go at one.