Damage is a funny word here. Yes - money was lost, but no building were destroyed, nor people physically harmed. “Actual damage” makes it sound like a lot more than lost time and a few extra contracts paid out.
Monetary damages are damages, I don't think this is particularly complicated. If I made it so you couldn't get several weeks of your wages for hours that you worked you would be rightly furious with me and feel like a victim.
Damages in the sense that warrants compensation and likely additional punitive damages as deterrence, agreed. But monetary damages don’t seem sufficient to justify jail time in a society that likes to claim it doesn’t have debtor’s prisons.
Yes, yes, criminal law and civil law are two different things and statutes can allow or require imprisonment in a criminal sentence. But we are discussing what is morally appropriate punishment for this misdeed, not what current law allows.
I’m not arguing against compensation and other dissuasive/retributive punishment - I did call it a misdeed. Suitable compensation and punishment are absolutely appropriate.
But yes, I am arguing that four years of prison time (there’s also three years of supervised release - so seven years of court oversight total) is disproportionate punishment, and probably any prison time at all for this act. Prison makes the most sense for violent criminals.
I am fine with lots of other compensatory and punitive consequences, including the criminal conviction itself which should not be underestimated as a public record visible in background checks, at least some kinds of orders restricting future activities with computers and/or his former employer for a suitable duration, plus whatever monetary consequences are deemed appropriate.
How much money would someone need to cause in damages to you or your loved ones before you change your tune? Steal your car? Your home? Your parent’s retirement? It’s just money!
Yes. It’s just money, which is why I want non-imprisonment punishments for any of those scenarios, unless prison would usefully achieve some remedial goal like making your car theft example less likely to recur because the person is locked up.
There are lots of better ways to punish this kind of crime, generally. Imprisonment doesn’t get my money back, is expensive for the taxpayer, is at least as likely to make the criminal more prone to reoffend as less prone to that given how typical American prisons work, and isn’t necessary for either retributive or deterrent purposes.
Their criminal record, any court order to pay compensatory and punitive damages, any loss of their own property or bankruptcy that results, and so on would be plenty of retribution and deterrence.
Now, if they try to flee from justice or violate court orders or hide assets in ways that imprisonment would usefully interfere with, that’s a different question. Prison makes sense in many cases, but merely making the victims of a nonviolent monetary crime feel satisfied is not inherently such a case.
I’m sorry to hear your grandma got targeted by con artists, but it’s a rare scam where imprisoning the few individuals who are actually within reach of arrest and who generate enough usable evidence to convict them will meaningfully protect the scam’s potential future victims. In those rare cases, imprisonment might well be appropriate.
I don’t see signs of that in the case we are discussing. This crime was a crime of opportunity against a large corporation causing only monetary harm to the corporation in the form of inconvenience and time wasted for its employees to clean up the mess, but not ruining anyone or anything beyond coworkers’ account profile settings, not even anyone’s paychecks.
Certainly this case was worthy of punishment, definitely worthy of the felony criminal conviction and potential damages if the employer wants to sue or if this criminal statute lets the court include that in the sentence, likely worthy of temporarily or permanently keeping him away from employer computer systems beyond something heavily locked down (e.g. point of sale screen), and maybe also temporarily or permanently away from computers or the internet in general if that won’t unreasonably prevent him from having some viable way of making a living, but not worthy of imprisonment without more reason for that.
I haven't even really been discussing the case from the OP. I'm more so just surprised at the number of comments (like yourself) that appear to be expressing sympathy for financial or white collar criminals.
I suppose it's a philosophical difference...I just hope that you appreciate how extreme the position is. The amount of fraud in this country is disturbing and I don't think it is compassionate/kind at all to keep these people out of prison while most people are struggling to make an honest living. It creates a moral hazard.
I’m not expressing sympathy for financial or white-collar criminals. They deserve lots of scorn and punishment, including more criminal convictions, fines, restitution, court orders, and court oversight than they typically get. My position is not what you seem to think it is, which would indeed be an extreme position.
I just don’t equate punishment with prison. I realize that the best kind of punishment isn’t always having the taxpayers pay for years of that person’s food and lodging, depriving their innocent relatives and colleagues of the emotional/family presence and professional labor/earnings of someone who may have been very noncriminally important to them in many ways outside of prison, introducing them to the many gangs and violent criminals that populate US prisons while simultaneously subjecting them to a traumatic change in life circumstances, turning them into low-paid involuntary workers for wealthy capitalists to profit from as is done in many privately run prisons pursuant to the exception in the Thirteenth Amendment, and so on.
Nothing I said is true only for the financial or white-collar criminal. In particular, poor brown or Black drug users are way over-imprisoned and that shouldn’t happen either. I’d actually rather harsher punishments for the financial white-collar criminal than for the poor minority drug addicted, but in most cases neither should involve prison.
Prison is clearly necessary in some cases and arguably necessary in others, but it shouldn’t be our first thought of how to punish a criminal - whether white-collar or blue-collar - especially not the way typical US prisons work.
I don't buy this equivalence of financial damage to a person with financial damage to a business.
If I had a business its finances would be separate from my personal finance using limited liability, so even if someone destroyed 100% of its value, it would only be no return on investment for me - sad and bad but totally not equivalent to losing all my personal money.
And I don’t buy this as a serious well thought out argument. If someone destroys your method of producing personal income they have indeed damaged your personal finances.
Compensation and damages would probably mean decades of a bleak existence with most of your meger earnings going to the compensation and damages you owe. Chances are it will be a long time before he can get a good paying job after this, not like he has a good reference from his previous employer. I would seriously consider the prison time if given the option.
You know that the prison time he was given does not rule out compensation and damages but rather might be in addition, right?
The company can still sue for those damages, and they can take all the findings of law and findings of fact from the criminal case as already proven without having to reprove those.
> Even if you had not said that, your argument ignores my point.
I don’t think I am. You argued against compensation and damages, which are not at all ruled out by the prison sentence, and said you’d seriously consider the prison time if given the option.
I assume mean that you’d consider the prison time as an alternative to the compensation and damages, but that’s not what happened here. Did you actually mean you’d consider the prison time whether or not the company could still sue you in civil court for damages and whether or not the criminal sentencing court could also order financial restitution?
If so, I guess I did miss that implication, but it seems unlikely. Maybe you would want the free lodging and food in that scenario due to the career and financial difficulties that will result from this, even if the free options on offer are a prison cell and prison food?
I think very few people with a spouse or kids (or elderly parents) depending on them would make the same choice, but I can see how some young single people might.
> “Do you understand what I'm saying?" shouted Moist. "You can't just go around killing people!"
> "Why Not? You Do." The golem lowered his arm.
> "What?" snapped Moist. "I do not! Who told you that?"
> "I Worked It Out. You Have Killed Two Point Three Three Eight People," said the golem calmly.
> "I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr Pump. I may be–– all the things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!"
> "No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Do Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.”
How is this a victimless crime or even almost a victimless crime? I’m confused by your post — you say it’s “almost a victimless crime” and then immediately describe who was victimized and why. So what do you mean? Just that it didn’t involve physical violence?
I'm not sure what is meant by supervised release but there is also three years of that after the initial four. He apparently also gets a permanent record as a felon, so I imagine it'll be hard for him to find new work. Without that, can he even have health insurance? He als can't vote in elections right? Sounds like his life is frankly going to be ruined.
From a Danish perspective I think that this is rather cruel.
It varies by state. In many states, felons can register to vote immediately after release (even while on parole) and aren't disqualified from programs like Medicaid. So it's not a death sentence despite what the system intends.
Florida passed a ballot measure allowing felons to vote a few years back. Our legislature just ignored it and instituted other requirements and hoops for them to jump through that made like 90+% of them ineligible to vote still.
It's just a punishment for being too foolish: if he scheduled it to switch some time after he's fired, that would be more funny to investigators and he would get less years. /s
