He’s not facing 110 years in prison…. At this point, adding up the time for each charge is journalistic malpractice.
- "adding up the time for each charge is journalistic malpractice"
I agree with you 100%, 99% of the time. Adding together the statutory limits, and publishing that without context, is journalistic malpractice (but great clickbait!). But it's not entirely wrong in this, exceptional outlier, case.
"A long time" does not equate to "simplistic addition-based sentencing calculation".
Yes, he was.
https://www.justice.gov/media/785641/dl?inline
I look then to Section 5G1.2{d) of the guidelines, which
tells us that where there are multiple counts, and the
guideline range exceeds the statutory maximum for the most
serious count, the court must impose consecutive terms of
imprisonment to the extent necessary to achieve the total
punishment.
There is a little bit of ambiguity, however, as to
what is meant by "total punishment" where the guideline
calculation calls for ~ife imprisonment, but Second Circuit
case law makes clear that in such a situation, the district
court is to stack or add up the maximum sentences for all
the counts.
In United States v. Evans, for example, 352 F.3d 65,
where the guideline calculation called for life
imprisonment but no count carried a life sentence, the
court held that the guideline range is 240 years, the
maximum sentences for all the counts added together.
Accordingly, here the guideline range is not life
imprisonment, but 150 years, the maximum sentences for each
of the 11 counts added together.If the crimes are similar, the judge is going to lump them together and pick the longest sentence as the one to serve. The rest will be served concurrently.
[edit]: And Braden Perry, a former CFTC lawyer, also agrees with the offense level of 43 [1]. They seem to do different calculations to get to that: McCarthy applies an enhancement for "organizer or leader of a criminal activity that involved five or more participants or was otherwise extensive", while Perry finds one for "having 25 or more victims".
To be fair: they also both agree a court could deviate downwards, if they find mitigating factors. That seems to be a key variable here: how many downward adjustments can the defense convince the court to apply.
[0] https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/federal-sentencing-gu... ("Federal Sentencing Guidelines Spell Deep Trouble for Sam Bankman-Fried")
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/05/sam-bankman-fried-could-face... ("Sam Bankman-Fried could face years in prison over FTX's $32 billion meltdown — if the U.S. ever gets around to arresting him")
He died 12 years into the sentence, in 2021, so I suppose it's possible he'd have been released early due to factors like good behaviour? Still, three-digit sentences have been seen before, and not every white collar criminal gets off with a slap on the wrist, even if a great many of them do.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Madoff#Plea,_sentencing...
The only way Bernie would have gotten out would have been with a pardon.
None of this happened but a pardon isn’t the only way.
This depends on the nature and scope of the crime. If there is one major crime and a number of smaller supporting crimes, judges will usually pick the longest sentence and the other sentences are imposed concurrently, the theory being that the smaller crimes are really just dependent parts of carrying out the bigger crime.
If there are several major crimes, judges will frequently impose consecutive sentences, especially if there is a series or pattern of major crimes. (For example, serial rapists, serial murderers, etc.) Generally, this is rare for white collar crimes, with the exception of standouts like Bernie Madoff (serial fraud).
Scope-wise, SBF has Madoff beat. And while he doesn't have the same length of offending as Madoff, he did commit a series of major crimes. It is thus realistic that the judge would sentence SBF to consecutive sentences if he is convicted on all counts.
That might be the theory in state cases, in federal cases following the Sentencing Guidelines, that often happens because if the total punishment calculated for the combination of offenses fits into a sentence available for the single crime with the maximum available punishment, the guidelines instruct that it be done that way (and, if not, they instruct that enough of the other sentences run consecutively to meet the calculated total punishment.)
This rule works independently of the structure of multiple major offenses or one major and many minor offenses, although it may tend to produce results roughly in line w8th the dichotomy you propose.
That's not how it works. The guidelines calculation is done based on all offenses, a total punishment is calculated, and “If the sentence imposed on the count carrying the highest statutory maximum is less than the total punishment, then the sentence imposed on one or more of the other counts shall run consecutively, but only to the extent necessary to produce a combined sentence equal to the total punishment.” US Sentencing Commission Guidelines Manual 2023, §5G1.2(d)
https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines/2023-guidelines-manual/annot...
LegalEagle taught me what I know about this topic: https://youtu.be/kr8gSdJ_Ggw?si=GVELc4ETIbg3FcB3
Well at least they weren’t intimating that the Bureau of Prisons had a state of the art life extension program.
> Adding up all the statutory maximum sentences for all the counts charged in an indictment is an exercise in clickbait disinformation. [0]
[0] https://popehat.substack.com/p/beware-the-flood-of-trump-sen...
Its not, even in the context where that is true [0] when the guidelines range calculated based on the facts charged plauisbly meet or exceed the sum of the statutory maximums for the individual offenses.
And $ amounts involved are a factor in the sentencing guidelines, and while there have been some changes to what is charged, I remember guidelinea calculations based on the original indictment were off the chart and I don't think the changes have done anythinf which would make that less true.
[0] the calculation is always an important fact, because it bounds the legal range of sentences, and even where thr guidelines make a sentence unlikely, the guidelines are not mandatory, and departures both above and below thr guidelines are within the power of federal judges, only the statutory minimums and maximums are hard limits, but it can sometimes be misleading to present the maximum sentence as likely on conviction.
From the article I linked (emphasis mine):
> First, the core of the Post’s article is a splashy infographic meant to act as Resistance porn. It adds up, on a Candyland-style path, the maximum sentence on each count in the New York state indictment against Trump, the Florida federal indictment for wrongfully retaining documents, and the new Washington D.C. indictment for his January 6 fraud. The infographic is plainly the beating clickbait heart of the piece. It’s also completely useless. The combined maximum sentences from the three cases is a meaningless, masturbatory number. It has nothing to do with what federal sentences he faces, as I note above, and New York criminal law experts (and I am not one) say that the maximum sentences in that case have nothing to do with the plausible sentence he faces there.
That's both, in the general case, technically true (the processes isn't adding up all the statutory maxima at one point) and substantively false (as for each charge, the sentence is clamped to the statutory range, and thus the sum of the statutory ranges is the actual legal maximum that can be applied, even though at no point in the sentencing calculation are the statutory maxima summed to get to the actual sentence; the actual sentences that are scheduled to run consecutively, which are already clamped to the statutory range, are summed.) Moreover, its particularly wrong, IIRC, and if the various changes to the charges haven't changed this, in SBF's case, because working through the facts in the indictment at least originally against the guidelines calculations for each charge very plausibly reached a guidelines range at or beyond the statutory maximum.
> That's not how federal sentencing guidelines work,
Federal sentencing guidelines are not mandatory, and federal courts can make departures within the range between the statutory minimum and statutory maximum above or below the guideline sentence. They are, to borrow from Pirates of the Carribean, more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules. Moreover, clamping sentence for each charge to the statutory range is exactly how the guidelines work.
Yes, it would be very useful (though highly subjective; even when departures aren't ultimately involved, whether conditions in the guidelines are applicable based on the jury verdict and the evidence at trial is the domain of often extensive post-verdict litigation that can amount to a mini-bench-trial on the guidelines; jounralists predicting the outcome of such would be getting in to highly speculative and error-prone rather than fact-based reporting) for coverage of federal criminal trials to present useful context around how the guidelines might apply based on the facts alleged in the indictment.
Popehat's repeated banging on the point that the reporting by the media of statutory ranges is generally useless for any real purpose is accurate and something that adds to the knowledge of someone who encounters it who has no pre-existing knowledge of how federal sentencing works. And for people who get the oversimplified idea from it that "adding up the sum of the statutory maxima never tells you what the realistic outer limit is for sentence in federal criminal cases, it is always significantly lower" will probably, for most cases they see reported in the media, mostly not have the wrong idea, even if they are working from a rule that is almost as oversimplified as "the sum of the federal statutory maxima is a realistic, if guaranteed to not be low, sentence estimate in federal criminal cases in general".
But several facts remain true:
1. The sum of the statutory maxima is the actual legal maximum total sentence, and
2. There are cases where that will ultimately set the maximum sentence under the guidelines, because the pre-clamping guidelines range for each conviction will exceed the statutory maximum,
3. There are cases where the actual sentence will exceed the guidelines sentence, and the maximum there will still be that set by the statutory limits on each offense.
To actually assess the likely range of federal sentences for a given indictment, you would need to review the indictment, the guidelines, and try to assess each of the potential guidelines factors against the allegations in the indictment (both the full set of facts alleged and the set of alleged facts that would allow conviction on each charge but produce the minimum guidelines range), and then compute what the actual sentence would be for the various possibilities under the guidelines, and then be familiar with the history of similar federal cases (especially in the same trial court and judge) and whether and in what circumstances departures from the guidelines ranges have been given, and assess that. All of which often gets into highly subjective, highly contentious, opinion, even when experts are involved. OTOH, you can not purport to report a likely sentence, and then report a maximum sentence, and you will be reporting a verifiable, clear legal fact, even if arguably one of often limited usefulness in predicting what people might like to predict.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_parole_in_the_United_S...
> Americans became more concerned with ensuring that people were punished – often severely – and began to doubt that prison could rehabilitate a person. The SRA rejected rehabilitation as the primary goal of our sentencing system. Instead, it stated that the purpose of imprisonment is punishment.