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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

That proving some things in court is easier than other things and by reducing down nuanced legal systems to "rich bad" doesn't help the situation any.

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Despite this being true, it is important that people are prosecuted for the "all" the wrongs they did and not just the "easy" ones. It isn't much of a justice system if you can get away with "hard to prosecute" crimes.

As a counterpoint, IMO it's important that people are only prosecuted when there is sufficient evidence for a likely and safe conviction (otherwise at best we will drag everyone through expensive court battles which don't lead anywhere, and at worst we will end up with unsafe convictions).

Especially when things are hard to prosecute exactly because rich people don't care about them.

This is how false conviction happens, so no. This is not the precedent we want to set.

IIRC the notorious gangster Al Capone was done on tax evasion, not on his main murder-heavy business.

I think Capone did not have any witnesses for his murder-heavy business. Here there were plenty.

It seems a legal issue was something that RICO fixed in 1970.

It was hard to pin down the mob boss to particular murder. They could get the lower level hitmen, sure, but tying it to the main boss was difficult. Recordings were not really a thing back then. Those that did talk were killed.

Rudy Giuliani (yes that Rudy Giuliani) had the first successful prosecution under RICO in the 1980's.

You can't intimidate a lack of tax payments for clearly possessed wealth. Unlike witnesses and accomplices.

I think the same approach is now used by German authorities against the (mostly Lebanese) "big family gangs" (Grossfamilien), that have also proven to be very capable of intimidating or killing witnesses, but cannot hide their acquired wealth.

It's heartbreaking when people are able to play the justice system. It's not necessarily about these exact people, but the fact that the system we all put our hopes and trust in, can be played.

Sometimes having your heart broken is simply caused by naivete.

Sure. Your statement can stand on its own. It's so broadly framed. I'm not sure where you want to go with that here specifically. If you want to 'accuse' me of naivety, I can assure you I try not to be. But I'm still (and I don't want to give that up) involved and care about the justice system. So it makes me sad to see it fail. But that's not being naive. Maybe 'heart-broken' was too strong of a word in this context. idk.

They may be wrong about the generalized conclusion but “some things are harder to prove” is hardly a strong argument against their claim in this specific instance.

And just throwing the word “nuance” into a comment doesn’t a counter-argument make.

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