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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The sentence probably isn't political. Seleznev really was working at a scale that surpasses that of pretty much anyone else the FBI was tracking for similar crimes. It was a monumentally brazen and damaging operation.

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That's twice the average for murder.

So if he defrauded 100k people we can say that defrauding one person is 1/50k as bad as murder?

Only if you consider prison to only be punishment and that punishment should scale linearly to the 'badness' of the crime

No, it's not. The average federal sentence for murder, which takes into account as many cases in which there are mitigating factors as ones where there are aggravating factors, is 20 years.

There are in this particular case no mitigating factors we can see, and several aggravating ones.

http://www.iapsonline.com/sites/default/files/Prison%20Sente...

Has the average time served at 48% of the sentence at 71 months.

140 months is a shade under 12 years.

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Since it's a federal charge, unless he cuts some kind of deal that moots this whole sentence, he will likely serve most of it. There's no federal parole, only a marginal reduction in time for good behavior.

I'll delete my comment and point people to yours, which is more correct :)

You're comparing federal to state sentences. Nothing harmonizes the two, and states generally parole inmates, which the federal system does not. That's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

I think it's disingenuous to think that there is no political aspect to the sentencing, not necessarily because he is the son of a Russian politician but rather because Russia refuses to cooperate with attempts to arrest these criminals the US are going to nail those that they can to make a point.

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