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Comment by costco | Hacker News Reader

A guy named Lev Dermen just got 40 years with a guidelines score of 47 (the table doesn't even go that high). He was charged with defrauding the government out of half a billion dollars in biodiesel tax credits, went to trial and kind of like SBF all the other conspirators testified against him. That case also had destruction of evidence, witness intimidation, and at the time of sentencing the government was still trying to recover a Bugatti and a bunch of money in Turkey from him.

But the number of victims and the hardship element probably means he's looking at life.

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I got offense levels:

* 7 as the 2b1.1 baseline

* +30 for dollar loss, which caps out at $550MM, against CFTC's estimate of $8Bn

* +6 for 25+ victims, another cap

* +2 for financial misrepresentations, maybe, depending on how bankruptcy fits in

* +2 for either sophisticated means or deliberate use of foreign jurisdictions (the same clause, one of those predicates is definitely going to hit)

* +4 for jeopardizing (or, in this case, destroying) a financial institution --- at a minimum, +2 (same clause) for >$1MM gross receipts

* +4 for his function as the leader in the crime

* +2 for obstruction, maybe

* +1-2 for grouping/combined offense level, depending on how the conspiracy, wire fraud, and campaign finance stuff groups out.

So that's low-to-high 50s as an offense level. 43 is straight life. But there's probably a statutory maximum in the mix here that takes life off the table somehow.

Later: I miskeyed the 2B1.1b1 cap, as 10MM (the bottom of the page); it's 550MM (on the next page). Doesn't change the analysis much, which is why SBF is so fucked.

I was hunting around for an easy way to do this kind of math, and found https://www.sentencing.us/ . I haven't done an amazingly deep validation, but the math lines up with the above, and thankfully SBF has done a pretty good job stress testing the various clauses, so I'm going to be bookmarking it for the future.

I started with sentencing.us, but after entering the dollar loss figures, anything I clicked got me "life", which I don't trust.

The math for that seems to line up w/ your math above though? 43 is accurately "life", and 7 + 30 + 6 for base + dollars + victims seems right.

I share your expectation that it'll turn out there's a statutory maximum somewhere, but the math seems the check out.

Yeah! It just didn't seem at the time like it was true, like maybe they linearly projected out the dollars or something. But no, from the guidelines doc, it looks very grim indeed for SBF.

It also makes the time gap between now and sentencing feel a bit performative. It doesn't make a ton of difference either way since he's managed to land himself in custody with the witness tampering antics, but it does mean that there's not much point in his lawyers quibbling over things like "how does the bankruptcy fit in" and "does blowing up your own company count as destroying a financial insitution, or is that intended for when you topple the victim of your crime", because even if we nix both those modifiers it just shifts him from "life plus cancer" to "life".

It's grim unless he can nudge the offense level up over 65,535

Once you get to a 43 offense level, the guidelines sentence (its not really a range at that point), irrespective of criminal history category (guidelines sentence ranges are a result of a table cross-referencing offense level and criminal history category) is straight life.

If you do it in the order in the guidelines manual, the dollar loss is the first figure after the base offense for the offenses to which it applies, so (with a base of 7 for the wire fraud charge), you'd get to 37 with it alone. But if the tool does it in a different order, putting some of the other factors first, or you work a different charge first and its applying the grouping rules as you go, it would be very easy to hit 43 for SBF at the +30 for the dollar loss, and so get pegged to "life".

The actual aggregate statutory maximum for the offenses he's been convicted of (115 years) will limit the actual sentence though.

I'm a little confused by this, 47 is higher than 43, and 40 years is less than life... it also looks like Lev maxed the dollar loss or came really close, so how come you're sure SBF gets life while this Lev guy got a higher score and only got 40 years?

You're confusing offense levels with years. The offense levels map to a range of months in custody.

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