Comment by stephendause | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stephendause | Hacker News Reader

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So when you are speeding, you are endangering people and property on the road. The amount of danger is proportional to the time you spend speeding among other things.

With the falsification of business records, the situation does not seem as clear-cut. It is wrong because it is preventing the public or other relevant parties from having access to accurate information. I don't know if one can really make a formula to calculate how much damage is done by a given falsification, but I personally do not think I would include the number of checks or (probably) the number of invoices written in that formula. The method of payment seems mostly incidental and not essential to the wrongness of the crime. (I include the number of payments as part of the method of payment.)

If this does not clear up my position, feel free to let me know. There is more I could write to flesh it out, but I don't know if that's necessary or if it'd be overkill =)

I think one of the key differences is that the argument here is that each falsification is separate from the other ones.

Which differs from say the situation where somebody gets charged with Murder, Assault with a deadly weapon, Possession of a gravity knife, and Battery. That scenario it's really one act (killing somebody with a gravity knife) that becomes 4 counts. And it feels to me a bit like misjustice to charge somebody with 4 counts as opposed to the worst one.

However, if you write 10 fake checks and cash them it seems to be perfectly reasonable to charge you with 10 counts of fake check writing.

The problem is double jeopardy. There are circumstances where you might not be guilty of the worst one, but could be guilty of the lesser charge. For example, you might not be guilty of the murder, but could be guilty of all of the other charges.

If you're found not guilty, they can't re-try you on the other charges. So they charge all of the possible charges at once -- including charges that would be logically incompatible -- and let the jury decide which ones apply.

The judge has some leeway in deciding whether your punishment should be four separate charges added up, or less than that, depending on state law. They can also have you serve you sentences "concurrently", which has a kind of elegance: if you're serving four sentences for the same action, you serve all four at once, which amounts to spending as much time in jail as the maximum.

Look at it this way: the more effort you spend trying to cover up your crime, the more likely it is you're going to get away with it. Therefore, when crimes are discovered where people went to great lengths to cover them up, they must be charged more aggressively to act as a deterrent for people who aspire to spend a lot of effort falsifying business records.

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