> Financial crimes deserve a financial penalty.

Nah. Financial crimes cause real harm. And financial penalties frequently aren't sufficient disincentive.

Imagine that I have no assets but am a good talker. So I go out an launch an "investment fund" that is just a Ponzi scheme. Let's suppose I take in $50m, pocket $10m, and spend the rest on "investment returns" and appearing to run a real business. I live high on the hog for 5 years before it all falls apart, at which point many too-trusting people have lost their lifes' savings. What is the correct penalty?

There's no way a financial penalty can be correct here because all of my money was stolen. If the government just sets me back the zero I started at, what punishment is that? Where's my disincentive to do it all again?

If anything, I'd argue financial crimes are more likely to deserve jail time. People who steal food may be doing it out of necessity. But nobody stealing millions through financial crimes can claim desperation. I don't think people who use suits to rob instead of ski masks are any less thieves.

Being raped, assaulted or having a family member murdered is worse than losing money.

Money can be repaid. You can't be unraped.

Rape and murder are extreme crimes and of course no financial loss is equal to them but there are other violent crimes that have less of an impact compared to losing money.

You might be thinking about someone stealing a person's TV but what about their life savings. What about a corporation that goes bankrupt because of financial misdeeds and people lose their jobs? My dad lost his job in the mid 90s and the effects on my family involved massive stress for years.

Financial concerns/economy seems to be the most important issue to voters in almost every election ever.

It's the 5th highest reason for divorce at 36% (https://www.insider.com/why-people-get-divorced-2019-1)

It can also can result in physical issues. Maybe you can't afford healthy food, maybe you can't afford health care due to financial loss.

I couldn't find statistics but I can't imagine that in cases of theft being repaid 100% or even 50% of your loss occurs that frequency (but no source so..)

In other words some financial crimes are worse than violent crimes.

I agree with your conclusion. Google News has correctly decided I'm interested in Ponzi schemes, so it shows me articles at least weekly about newly discovered large ones. A very common element is people retired or on their way who have lost everything. I'd much rather get a punch in the snoot than to spend years slowly dying of stress, poor nutrition, and patchy medical care.

> Being raped, assaulted or having a family member murdered is worse than losing money

Violent and financial/corruption crimes are in categories to themselves.

The former for obvious reasons. The latter, because they corrode the institutions that make civilization work. Let financial crime--specifically corruption--run rampant and you'll lose more lives to riots, civil war or worse than to murder.

It's no secret that car factories in peacetime make good tanks in war. Also, in peacetime, they employ many voters and their families. Ghosn was an immensely powerful man. He used his influence for personal enrichment. Enrichment his family collaborated to defend. Kings' courtiers had strict punishments for disloyalty for a reason. Much of that was personal. But some tied to the integrity of the state.

We cannot excuse multimillionaires from running from the law while claiming to have a just society just because they had good PR. Ghosn, and his family [1], must be held accountable.

[1] his son, Anthony Ghosn, facilitated the escape [a] as did his daughter, Maya Ghosn, who is profiled in the article

[a] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nissan-ghosn-taylor-bail-...

Are those the only crimes that involve jail time you can think of?

We spent half a century sending people to jail for years or decades for possessing a bit of marijuana. You can be sent to jail for non-payment of speeding fines, or fishing at the wrong time of year. Or peacefully protesting government policies.

Money often represents opportunity, sometimes its lack can cause significant distress. Say you want to go on vacation but find that all your bank accounts are in the red, you are not going to make that vacation, instead you are probably going to spend significant amounts of time trying to fix the resulting issues. Someone dropping by years later with a few million in hand isn't going to give you those years of your life back.

Well if you're going to go to the extreme, how about treason?

Let's say you sell military secrets to an enemy that results in nuclear destruction of your country and deaths of millions of people. The act of exchanging that secret for money was nothing more than moving some bits around on the internet, certainly non violent itself. Would you retain this strange protection from responsibility for consequences of your action in this case as well?

You write that in a tone of contradiction, but I don't see what in my comment contradicts that.

What about death as a result of money stolen from public health?

I’d imagine the penalty at least involves returning any stolen money, but a garnishment on future income and additional IRS scrutiny should do it.

I actually think jail time isn’t enough a disincentive without the financial penalty because otherwise it can just be a cost of doing business.

For example there was a chronic thief in SF that stole peoples’ laptops from cafes. She was jailed multiple times but because the police had no way of knowing where she hid the stolen goods they were still never recovered and presumably she kept her earnings even after jail time.

Oh, yeah, I totally agree that there should be financial penalties larger than the ill-gotten gains. I'm just saying that isn't enough.

There's a legal expression (it's in French originally) that says

"You can't get blood from a stone"

This effectively means financial crimes can never be repaid in full, and frequently only small percentages get repaid. It also means the government can never hope to actually do anything to help other than punishment.

Going after financial crimes to protect victims ... just doesn't work.

Somehow this is enormously at odds with people's expectation of justice, and people either just can't or refuse to believe that's really how it works.

> at which point many too-trusting people have lost their lifes' savings

People should be a little smarter and not fall for Ponzi schemes. Furthermore, many people who invest in such schemes, understand how they work but hope to get profit before it collapses.

> People should be a little smarter and not fall for Ponzi schemes

Blaming the victims is not a solution.

This logic can be applied to justify stopping punishing any crime (“well, they should have stayed at home if they did not want to get mugged”, “they should know better than leave their house for the week if they did not want to get burglarised”, etc).

The victim-perpetrator binary is a false dilemma. Courts recognize contributory negligence in car accidents, why shouldn't they recognize them for self-inflicted financial harms in which one was aware or should have been aware of the risks?

So you’re going with victim blaming as your defense here?

I don't think you understand how scams work. They're engineered so that somebody will fall for them. If we made everybody 10% smarter, scammers would just make their scams 10% cleverer.

I also think a linear "smartness" model misses it. Both intelligence and knowledge are multidimensional. Everybody has strengths and weaknesses, and well-run scams target particular weaknesses.

I'm assuming you are actually a troll, or maybe you haven't actually looked beyond the headline. Many "schemes" are very legitimate looking, offering modest returns. At the moment with very low bank deposit even a 10% investment fund is attractive. Also vulnerable often cannot distinguish good will from good acting by purveyors.

Just recently it has come to light that a crooked funeral fund here in Australia has been preying on indigenous people for years with no prospect on their deposits being returned

> Financial crimes deserve a financial penalty.

Financial crimes, aka crimes rich people commit, to be richer, deserve much more harsh treatment that we give them today. You can go to jail for years for shoplifting (aka crimes poor people commit) few thousand dollars worth of goods. People should be much more often sentenced to go to jail for life for committing millions of dollars worth of financial crimes.

Register theft also occurs so does stealing from the common tipjar. It's not always 10s of millions, often it's thousand per year that people siphon off. It's till financial crimes.

Financial crimes are not violent and therefore should be punished lightly.

If you're a rational criminal, you might think along these lines:

* I am considering committing a crime that is worth X to me.

* The price (punishment) for this crime is Y.

* I only have to pay the price if I'm caught and convicted, both of which have some probability between 0 and 1.

So the effective price for committing this crime is Y multiplied by the probability I'm caught and convicted.

If

    X > P(caught) * P(convicted) * Y

Then I should commit the crime. Otherwise, it's not worth it.

For financial crimes, it's safe to say that P(caught) and P(convicted) get lower and lower the richer and more powerful you become. You have access to the best accountants and attorneys, making certain financial crime reliably profitable and increasingly attractive.

Therefore it stands to reason that while there is a line past which a punishment becomes excessive, an effective punishment must lead would-be criminals to decide that the risk is not worth it. Until this is the case, we have to either increase P(caught & convicted), or else increase Y; we can't do neither.

Probably increasing both is best; an increase in fines (Y) could fund the increased enforcement (P) necessary. Good luck passing those laws, though.

the second term is more clearly written as: P(convicted|caught)

That makes no sense.

A home burglary where no one's present is non violent. Do you think that should be punished lightly? It causes orders of magnitude less damage than a lot of financial crime.

Burglary carries a presumption of force.

People steal packages off doorsteps all the time. It requires no force.

Not burglary.

You may be confusing burglary with robbery.

> Burglary is a crime under both the common law and the model penal code. Exact definitions of burglary under the common law vary by jurisdiction though they all criminalize some form of illegally entering a building at night with the intent to commit a crime within.

From https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/burglary

Typically this means you've broken into a domicile (sometimes lesser charges of Burglary exist for non-domicile, eg a vacant commercial building). If you break into someone's home, at night, while it's occupied, the law presumes you intended to do violence.

This presumption is usually correct!

This https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/defense/penal-code/459/ says that just entering a building with the intent to commit a crime counts as burglary even if no force was required.

> If you break into someone's home, at night, while it's occupied, the law presumes you intended to do violence.

Well yes. But I explicitly said "no one's present". And it usually happens during the day where I live, because that's when people work.

Why does violence matter when determining a punishment?

Someone stealing my life savings will have a much greater impact than someone punching me in the face.

How light can a punishment be before it's no longer discouraging the crime?

Clients of Bearings bank and Nick Leeson would disagree

Weak trolling attempt, and TBH totally wrong forum to troll in the first place.

> please explain what, exactly, Ghosn was accused of stealing, and from whom?

Should every company executive be free to steal millions of dollars from their companies [1][2]? Be free to "renovate homes for Ghosn in Rio de Janeiro, Beirut, Paris and Amsterdam" on pensioners' dimes? Get a free pass from investigation by multiple countries [3] because they ran a PR campaign while they were pillaging?

Anyone informed defending Ghosn is essentially rejecting the rule of law, full stop. He's wanted for serious crimes in multiple countries with discordant agendas.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nissan-ghosn-allegations-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Ghosn#Initial_arrest

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-22/france-is...

So you just admitted that all the hypotheticals about victims in poverty and $10 thefts are nonsense. He took millions from Nissan and Renault, neither of whom are exactly widows and orphans.

And they were all quite happy to go along with it, for a long, long time. Did he hold a gun to their heads and make them hire him? And couldn't their Boards just fire him?

> hypotheticals about victims in poverty and $10 thefts are nonsense

Hypotheticals, sure. I’m not familiar with his every crime. Just the big ones.

> Did he hold a gun to their heads and make them hire him? And couldn't their Boards just fire him?

It sounds like the answer to the above questions, for you, is yes. Fraud. Embezzlement. All okay, because the ultimate victims, the shareholders, either didn’t push back better or were further defrauded by a possibly corrupt, possibly incompetent Board. We can’t know either way because the guy up and offed to Beirut, where he sits a fugitive of multiple international arrest warrants.

> a possibly corrupt, possibly incompetent Board

So there we are. The people in charge of controlling him, the people whose job it is to supervise him, didn't.

You can apply that logic towards a variety of other crimes: the principal who doesn't properly supervise the teacher who beats students, the police chief who doesn't properly supervise the officers who form their own drug running gang. There's usually someone else you can blame besides the people who commit the immediate crime; there's always someone if you find creative ways to blame the victims. Most people grow out of thinking this way, though.

It doesn't make you a monster if you just happen to admire a criminal. That's human nature; people have admired all sorts of criminals, especially stylish ones who get away with things. There's a whole film genre about them.

But, like, if we're going to discuss them on a message board, we should probably be clear about the fact that Danny Ocean and his gang deserve to be --- in fact, really kind of need to be --- in prison.

> people in charge of controlling him, the people whose job it is to supervise him, didn't

Sure. I made an analogy to Enron elsewhere.

But their incompetence, potentially collusion, doesn’t excuse Ghosn. And the path to holding them responsible is through him. The flip side of this, also unexplored, is that people with skeletons in their closets don't tend to hide them alone. Who else is complicit? Who among them was blackmailed, and which decisions were unduly influenced by that?

That’s ridiculous. A crime is a crime, and stealing money - be it physically or on paper - has real repercussions to real people. It deserves more than a financial penalty.

>A crime is a crime

This is most certainly false. A crime is a violation of a law. Laws are passed by groups of people, not handed down by some infinitely wise and just being. For example, in many African nations, it is illegal to be gay. Would someone imprisoned for the "crime" of being gay be justified in escaping? Would Julian Assange be justified in escaping his dungeon for exposing the crimes of the US government?

I can't believe you would actually try this dead end argument. Let me guess, if somebody robs you tonight, they didn't commit a crime, they just violated a law that were passed by a group of people that punishes the impoverished who justified their actions.

>I can't believe you would actually try this dead end argument.

I cannot believe the stunning inability for people to understand that laws are not based on some sort of immutable, objective moral code but are invented by human beings. Do you think Harriet Tubman was a bad person because she helped those who violated the law? Would you have contacted the authorities immediately when you saw an escaped slave, due to their violation of the law?

What are you trying to get out of these debates you engage with yourself online? Find something better to do with your time and maybe you will be happier.

This is one reason why political crimes are treated with different considerations under international treaties and in the day to day norms of states. The right to asylum, for example, in one country to avoid prosecution in another country exists, and it is regularly exercised.

America regularly support people who are charged with normal crimes that have obvious political undertones, as they should. This is an unmitigated good.

Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Guangcheng

Other popular examples exist. These cases are also often very polarizing for the people of the country who is claimed to have been the victim of some political crime.

Note the definition of political crime ( https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/political%20crime ) exactly makes the link: “political offenses … exclude any possibility of extradition.”

What makes up a political crime? By definition it can be subjective but some entire categories are usually included.

On the one hand, Assange is considered by many to be a journalist doing journalistic things, while others argue he committed espionage doing political things as some kind of spy. Prosecution for either is usually considered a political persecution worthy of asylum.

Ecuador granted Assange political asylum because of the U.S. investigation into Assange for his publications that were in the public interest.

> Financial crimes deserve a financial penalty.

I'm not sure what you mean by it, can you please give an example?

For most people, money represents the time out of their lives it took to earn it.

If you steal $10 from someone, and they earned it from a job that pays $10/hour - you didn't steal $10, you stole an hour of their life.

That's the calculus when you are well off and secure, which is not most people. If you steal money from someone who makes 10 an hour, you have probably stolen their rent and ability to feed themselves, not their time. Worrying about time is for people who have the basics well covered.

"He had essentially zero chance of being acquitted" - So if I commit a crime it's morally acceptable to flee justice if the probability or evidence exceeds a certain threshold? In other words, the more proof there is that I committed a crime gives me more justification to avoid punishment?

"He was the victim of Nissan executives who didn't like having a gaijin be their boss:" Prove it.

"If you disagree with that, suppose Britney Griner somehow escaped from Russian "justice"? How would you feel then?" - They aren't related cases with completely different circumstances and crimes. It also doesn't matter.

To bad Britney Griner doesn't have the $15 million~ that Ghosen needed to escape. https://fortune.com/2020/01/10/carlos-ghosn-net-worth-2020-f...

> He had essentially zero chance of being acquitted

I think GP was referring to the fact that Japan has an over 99% conviction rate.

Even if we presume that Japan has unusually high quality prosecutors and judges, that rate is so high that I think it’s reasonable to presume a fair number of innocent people are getting convicted (which happens lots of places, of course, but Japan’s conviction rate is still unusual).

"Scholars say the biggest reason for Japan's very high conviction rate is the country's low prosecution rate and the way Japan calculates its conviction rate is different from other countries.[2][3][4] According to them, Japanese prosecutors will prosecute only the very few cases in which they are most likely to be guilty and not many others."

https://web.archive.org/web/20220712033655/https://www.nippo...

I don't think it's reasonable to assume anything happens if there's an alternative explanation.

The 99% rate is NOT because the system (prosecutors, judges) is "good", the rate is so high because system is structured to bully anyone arrested to admit to the crimes. You're basically coerced into confession, whether or not you did it.

There's a simple way to test this:

What percentage of convictions are accompanied by confessions?

I don't know the answer to that, actually.

There is another factor to it - not trying cases which aren't certain victories as joining that 1% of the conviction rate is an extremely shameful failure. The conviction rate is a "smell" regardless of how you slice it.

> "He was the victim of Nissan executives who didn't like having a gaijin be their boss:" Prove it.

Oh, sure. Like underhanded whisper campaigns and unspoken agreements are susceptible to "proof."

> Financial crimes deserve a financial penalty

Eyeball related crimes deserve an eyeball-related penalty, car crimes deserve a car penalty, gun crimes deserve a gun penalty.

I mean, really. Did you even try to think of one counter-example to your claim before you wrote it?

> He was the victim of Nissan executives who didn't like having a gaijin be their boss:

Largely agree.

> Financial crimes deserve a financial penalty.

That's a very old aristocratic view of financial "wrong-doing", still persists somewhat these days because the idea that for "people with money" with a good reputation, being condemned in public and losing their good name is already a penalty big enough.

That's... let's just say this line of thinking should stay in the past.

Ghosn "the victim" is my favorite part of this post.

1) not sure this is really relevant. If you don't trust the country's laws you are doing business in dont do business there. Part of the reason I dont plan on opening a factory in Liberia is because i wouldnt trust their legal system to protect me. Im happy working in USA even though their legal system shares suspicious statistics with Japan.

The Feds in USA have a 97% guilty rate, so this same logic could be used basically saying because defendants in federal USA trials have virtually no chance of getting off scott free they can escape and we shouldnt call that injustice.

Ignoring all that - if I were in his shoes I’d do the same - guilty or innocent.

I mean, even if I wasn’t in his billionaire shoes I’d do the same - if facing a long imprisonment in a foreign country I’d take chance at escaping any day.

> Financial crimes deserve a financial penalty.

Can you explain this one?

Do you believe violent crimes require a violent penalty?

> Do you believe violent crimes require a violent penalty?

It’s certainly a common belief, imprisoning someone is inherently a violent penalty.

So the people stuck sorting out his mess, having to spend weeks in office going through the paperwork generated by one shell company after the other, should also file charges against him for aggravated assault?

People get paid for that, it’s a job.

So it is okay when we exchange captivity for money? So if we converted the money he stole into an hourly rate we could stick him into prison until the sun burns out and call it a job?

If someone else assigns you a job, it’s called slavery.

He clearly took payment in advance for it and knew spending time would be part of it if he was caught. So he basically signed up for it himself.

No, but the only strong case for imprisonment as a punishment is to separate violent people from the rest of society.

That is a form of violence. Think about how many people commit suicide when they lose money for one reason or another.

>Do you believe violent crimes require a violent penalty?

In many cases, yes.

I disagree about financial crimes deserving (only) financial penalties, but I think you're broadly right. It's all but impossible for a native to get a fair trial in Japan, let alone a foreigner...

1) Based on what? The fact that evidence against him was overwhelming(?), or this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate

"Japan

The conviction rate is 99.3%. By only stating this high conviction rate it is often misunderstood as too high—however, this high conviction rate drops significantly when accounting for the fact that Japanese prosecutors drop roughly half the cases they are given. If measured in the same way, the United States' conviction rate would be 99.8%."

And he has since had to settle a massive fraud charge from the US SEC and is the subject of an arrest warrant from France now too. Bit hard to just dismiss the whole thing as being due to racist authoritarian Japan.

2) What was he a victim of? There are allegations and counter allegations, why should he have the presumption of innocence but not these "Nissan executives"?

> In his shoes, I would feel morally justified in escaping.

I'm guessing most CEO types would feel moral in personally deciding the punishment for their crimes is unfair and therefore they are justified in committing more crimes to get away with their earlier crimes...

> If you disagree with that, suppose Britney Griner somehow escaped from Russian "justice"? How would you feel then?

An emotionally charged question because of the situation now, but there are many who get "unfair" sentences for drugs all over the world including people jailed in Russia for similar crimes, people executed in South East Asia and the Middle East for drugs, and people locked away in the US for years on non violent crimes based on legislation and prosecutions orchestrated by the likes of President Biden and Vice President Harris.

Not that you can't be against all of those things, but it's a pretty huge crutch that seems to be trying to equate Japan's justice system with Russia's, and harsh penalties for personal drug use with the often very lenient punishments for fraud and embezzlement. "If you aren't with Ghosn then you're with Putin" is a bridge too far.

> Edit. Everyone talking about hypothetical burglaries and $10 thefts from poor people: please explain what, exactly, Ghosn was accused of stealing, and from whom?

Some millions of dollars. From company shareholders.

there are plenty of britney griner in california in jail for weed thanks to the same people that now fight for freeing britney griner.

Point me to a single person in California jail for 9 years for possession of under 1 gram of weed. CA legalized weed and then went the extra mile (which many states haven't) to expunge existing convictions and for people being punished currently, downgrading most felony possession counts to misdemeanors and reducing/dismissing the rest of the charges;

https://www.pubdef.ocgov.com/programs/dismissal-and-re-sente...

So if the people Kamala Harris prosecuted got less than 9 years, that's OK?

"only a few dozen people were sent to state prison for marijuana convictions under Harris’ tenure." https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/09/11/kamala-harris-prosecu...

Just bottomless wells of bad faith arguments. It's incredible.

We were talking about marijuana prosecutions in the US vs. Russia. How is it "bad faith" to mention prosecutions in San Francisco?

When was the last prosecution in California? Are there any people in jail today for the crime? What was the average sentence of the 6 people per year who went to prison while Harris was DA? What crime were those people convicted of and what quantity of drugs did it involve? Do you think Chesa was inappropriately lenient in choosing not to prosecute crimes? The tack of your supposed argument let’s me know plenty enough that I’m not remotely interesting in continuing this conversation.

You ask five questions and then say you're not interested in continuing this conversation. And then you bring up Chesa, whom no one's mentioned at all. Cute.