With Epstein dead there's no reason why anyone would be. Any former "party friends" can always be paid off, or discouraged in less subtle ways.
The more interesting question is - who replaced Epstein?
At the end of the day he deserves everything he's getting
So yeah. I'm pretty sure he's getting the slammer while waiting for sentencing.
He's been convicted, he's gonna stay in jail.
It sounds like its plausible, but i'd like to know for a fact
> There's no realistic grounds for appeal
They are required to stay out of custody while that appeal is pending, though.
I don't know how that would play out, but he isn't exactly looking good, character-wise.
To me, probably. He exhibits much of the same traits as Elizabeth Holmes in terms of perspective on his own intelligence and entitlement.
She surrendered her passport, without mentioning she had or had access to another one, and was caught planning to leave for Mexico with a one way ticket and no accommodation booked, and then tried to claim it was "for a friend's destination wedding" (which shouldn't even have mattered - the surrender of the passport meant she was forbidden from leaving the country, regardless the reason).
How the hell people this dumb become CEOs.
He could have chartered a boat to Venezuela and taken a few hundred million with him.
Of course, all the people he defrauded might follow him.
Is there not a house next to Edward Snowden?
Why stay?
Extradition treaty mainly just lets some foreign country start a process in local courts to hand someone over.
You need to butter up a place with adversarial relations.
Or go somewhere with ironclad constitutional protections against extradition. And even then, e.g. France only has those for its own citizens and may still prosecute you locally for your crimes abroad.
The fact that he did this instead of executing a planned escape and going to hangout with Ruja Ignatova is the main reason for me to think he believed his own shit.
Leaked his ex-gf's private diaries in an attempt to intimidate her.
Decided to testify at his own trial.
I'm almost certain that he thought he would give a grand speech and all the jurors would instantly take his side, just like he had experienced with VCs, journalists, employees and other sycophants for the past decade.
Given how harsh the US is on financial crimes, I always thought the former opinion was smarter. Nick Leeson only got sentenced to 6 1/2 years in Singapore (and served 4). Or, alternatively, most stats show higher levels of corruption he could've finessed in his favor in the Bahamas.
As soon as he arrived on US soil it was over for him IMO.
"So this guy is guilty right?"
(10x other Jurors) "Agreed".
(That one "For Fairness" Juror) "I dunno, we're sending this guy to jail for an awfully long time. I think we need to think it over a bit longer."
"Fine, Lets get pizza".
* 4 hours later *
"Okay, we thought about it some more. He's guilty right?"
(11x other Jurors) Guilty.
-----------
At least, I'm amused by the thought of a "reverse 12 Angry Men" style setup, where everyone agrees upon the same premise (that a quick decision is a bad idea for everyone), but the additional time thinking changed nothing.
On a serious note - not sure how much you get compensated on Juries but in Australia it is not that much if you work as a software dev, so staying on a Jury for 8 weeks could mean even not being able to pay your mortgage for some (yes you should have savings but...). I am sure there is a financial incentive to finish these things quickly?
They need a better system. I can’t get a shorter trial. There’s no system to put you in a pool when you are freer.
Larger companies will theoretically pay for a few days or whatever and will, in practice, pay for a bit more. But something like grand jury trials can go on for months and AFAIK there's no obligation for companies to cover you taking those months off while still being paid. In practice, in my personal experience, the government avoids pressing people into service who really don't want to do so for an extended period but they have no obligation to do so.
Most large companies do, however.
> When an exempt employee reports for a full workweek of jury duty and does no work for his or her organization, the employer is not required to pay the exempt worker for the week. However, _if the employee does any work for the organization, including checking and responding to work messages/emails, the employee is considered to have worked during the workweek and is entitled to a full week of pay._
So basically if you check your email then you are entitled to the full week anyhow. One mess up and an ensuing lawsuit would blow the whole average year's worth of jury duty savings from _not_ paying your juror-ing employees.
He wasn't dismissed. The standard was pretty high.
I've been in several panels from which jury selection was being done, and in the screening-for-hardships portion, those type of things were not, in and of themselves, hardships. Its rather the norm for private employers not to pay for jury duty, leaving you only with the rather minimal jury stipend.
I feel like that's impossible to happen in Manhattan federal court. That city's pizza is so good.....
Then again, if you live there, maybe your Pizza standards are just higher?
I was also paid by the court for attending jury duty (a physical check that arrived in the mail a few months later). It was not very much money (I think around $20 per day) - this money was supposed to cover things like Transport, parking fees and meals. In my case the trial was called off after 3 days so the check was for around $60.
Maybe if you are part time or on a contract it is different.
They are at least prevented from firing you though.
I served on a jury a number of months back, and in my part of the US, they pay $10/day. They ask if you want to donate it to the fund that stocks and maintains the jury waiting area, and 90% of everybody says yes.
If you can show that you'll suffer an undue hardship (like, for instance, financial distress or having to care for a loved one), they'll dismiss you from service and mark you as having served.
I was called for jury duty via email sent to my home when I was studying abroad for a semester, 4,500 miles away.
Unbeknownst to me, my parents requested an excuse from jury duty on my behalf because I was out of the country, which upset me, as I was hoping for the 9,000 * $0.50 in travel allowance...
Seemed like so much money at the time!
First thing we all agreed we would not be coming back on Monday…
But, frankly, if I were on trial by a jury of my peers, I’d appreciate it if people took their time.
It also turned out that we were all mostly on the same page.
Criminal stuff i certainly would have not agreed.
The high-profile cases like SBF's are a tiny fraction of jury trials in the US, most trials have no significant risk of jury tampering and the jury is not sequestered, meaning that if we had needed more time for deliberation, we would have just gone home for the evening and shown up at the courthouse the next day. We did have our phones collected at the start of the day and returned at the end, which seemed like a reasonable precaution against both "independent research" and distractions/interruptions, and would have also made jury tampering somewhat more difficult if anyone was so inclined.
The lunches were sandwiches from the vending machine. Two choice ham and without meat. They were good I can taste the salt on the ham as I write this.
The conversations within the jury are like tv. Immediately you have a few who think anyone on trial is guilty. You have a smaller group who want to find reasons they may not. At some point someone will accuse that group of being part of the criminal conspiracy. Friends and enemies are formed. Promises and deals were made but all disappears after the verdict (someone offered me a job and ghosted later).
Protections? I had a job offer to start that week that I lost because I couldn't start. No police protections.
The actual trial is very boring. Police reading notes. Long winded questions without any tv drama.
Worthwhile as an experience.
In our case if you reached a verdict you were done serving so no need to drag it out.
Kind of scary that this is the rigor our justice system hinges on.
It was also a pretty one sided case.
That’s not the scary part. The scary and eye opening part is that an obviously frivolous lawsuit against can bankrupt you.
There is a YouTuber with h3h3 productions and he got hit with a lawsuit and it cost them USD 50k + USD 170k, at least. Maybe chump change if you’re a billionaire but I’d lose by default if you were to sue me.
The guidelines calculations, contrary to public belief, are pretty easy! You will have a pretty good success rate just carefully reading the charged statutes in the indictment and then following the instructions in the guidelines. But the PSR, prosecution, and defense filings all take a bunch of time, and involve "reporting" or "research" or whatever you'd want to call it.
That process ostensibly can't even start until everyone knows what the precise convictions were.
For what it's worth, I think there's a very good chance he just gets the statutory maximum penalties here, because the dollar loss and victim count numbers max out the 2B1.1 guidelines (which, for instance, cap out at $10MM in dollar losses). Attributing specific dollar losses and victim counts is ostensibly one of the things that makes sentencing take so long, but as long as it takes I think the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
† Later: they're definitely not public; there's a whole victims rights thing about getting victims partial access to PSRs so they can be heard in the sentencing process. I guess I can stop looking for them.
But the number of victims and the hardship element probably means he's looking at life.
* 7 as the 2b1.1 baseline
* +30 for dollar loss, which caps out at $10MM, 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.
I share your expectation that it'll turn out there's a statutory maximum somewhere, but the math seems the check out.
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.
Follow up - is there any kind of correlation in the gap length, between sentencing and PSR ?
I could see a situation where the gap is longer than a sentence, and that would be pretty sad for the prosecuted...
But his sentence is going to be so long that there isn't going to be any injustice at play for him to be in confinement for a few months while they work the numbers out. He's not getting out in a year or two.
I doubt he'll get out before sentencing, he's looking at up to life in prison so in addition to having a demonstrated history of ignoring his release conditions he'll also be a huge flight risk.
It is not often that I get to say this lately, but the jury restored some of my tired faith in the system in US.
I believe that's what you're supposed to do, as implied by "beyond a reasonable doubt" -- so good job!
I was on the jury of a federal fraud trial with 2 defendants with 15 charges, ~30 million in losses.
We were thorough and went through each count separately, including reviewing some of the evidence, and were done in maybe 8 hours spread across 2 days.
We ended up with a mixed verdict: one count not guilty for both, another not guilty for one. I fully believe they were aware and committed fraud for the not guilty counts, but the prosecutor wasn’t able to cross the “reasonable doubt” threshold in our minds for those specific instances.
Only thing we weren’t super careful about was the first requirement for Mail/Wire fraud, which is “Mail and wires” were used.
It was amusing that the prosecutors brought in a bank IT guy to explain that “the internet uses wires”, but not really something we questioned.
I wonder if they did that to avoid having to explain to the jury that wire fraud does not actually require the use of wires...
And are modern fiber optic cables wires in any sense of the word? Does the relevant statute in USC18 actually define "wire" for the purpose of the crime?
Part of me thinks that wireless communications must be included, but one might make the case that even then, information/communication is transmitted over wire at some point.
"having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice"
‘That is correct.’
One question for legal people—why is there such a long gap between conviction and sentencing? In this case, the sentence won't be set until March of next year.