I explained how giving the short obvious answer screwed me. You have to grasp the story I told in totality if you want to render judgements based on how smart you know everybody is. Every sentence I included was for a reason, it fits together like a puzzle. There were many other facts I left out because they were unnecessary. But for some reason, you simply look for slim reasons to attack. smh
In this case it's likely that the lawyers are the smartest people in the room when it comes to the law, which is all that matters.
You didn't say it because your reasoning is motivated, you're inventing something to say to and about me to indicate your scorn.
But that is why I wrote in the first place, to say that everybody is heaping scorn on SBF and ignoring what it's like to be asked those questions in a trial environment.
So finally we've arrived at a place where you have the beginning of a chance of understanding what I was saying all along. Sorry it took this long, but I was saying "why is everybody tripping over themselves to register their scorn, when the facts of the matter are more interesting. Facts should motivate juries, not scorn."
I don't live in the world of scorn, and your scorn does not make me feel bad. It makes me think less of you, that you can't engage in a discussion with trying to self congratulate and seek group approval for your distaste for people who are different.
and before you say "I didn't say that", I can't write a million replies to a million people (I actually can, but people don't like to read it) so I'm replying at this point in a multi-message thread to the overall tone of the crowd that you are agreeing with.
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>whether he had taken a private plane to the Super Bowl—to which Sassoon responded by presenting a photograph of SBF fast asleep in the embrace of a comfy chair on a private jet
Look, if I, an out of shape nerd with no interest in sports, were travelling to a Super Bowl city, to meet various financial big shots who are all there, to also promote my finance-oriented crypto scheme, when a fair percentage of sports venues are called BITCONNECT STADIUM and a fair percentage of athletes are endorsing crypto schemes, AND, I'm running a multi-billion dollar company in Bermuda and I routinely fly private absolutely everywhere....
did I fly a private plane to the superbowl? literally? no, no I didn't. I went in an Escalade.
But I know you wouldn't like that answer, and I don't want to be accused of lying, so let me figure out the spirit of your question. Any analysis tells me that the spirit of your question is to paint me as a bad person. Why is a public servant (prosecutor) conspiring to make me look bad? How about we focus on the facts and not try to paint ugly pictures. You bet I'd roll my eyes and look helpless at that moment.
Then to have everybody here, supposedly a bastion of analytical people, simply take pleasure in making fun of somebody caught in an unfair process, which is a process they would melt in if they were exposed to it, is discouraging.
SBF was guilty, he should be punished, but all you rabble wanting to throw tomatoes at him as they lead him away? Nah, you're just rabbling bullies.
It sounds like you think he might be trying to be honest and forthright, but his intentions are lost in translation.
Whereas the other commenters think it's more likely that he was being obstructionist?
I'm not thinking it's all one way or the other.
A person who is lying/willing to lie will still take every opportunity to tell the truth if it makes him look good.
Separately, an autistic person has trouble understanding and being understood, and then emotions flare and the autistic person is more disconnected.
His autistic answers to questions can look evasive, but they are not necessarily, especially if the truth is actually on his side. There will be many questions he is trying to answer honestly because the truth is on his side, but his awkwardness looks evasive.
He may simultaneously have a motive and willingness to also be evasive and lie.
And then a layer of he-said-she-said, there are always two sides to a story and how to remember and tell it, and the truth lies in the middle (with the lies? hahaha)
If the defendent is entitled to the benefit of the doubt, I am pointing out that much of what people are making great sport of here can be interpreted as reasonable doubt. But at the same time, I don't doubt that there was a strong case against him overall, and he was guilty.
To use a blunt analogy, to me I'm hearing people saying "look at that lying cheating wop eat spaghetti on his private plane and as his last meal!" (I chose Italian because I am) Well, that lying cheating Italian might be named Ponzi (the other reason I chose Italian) and he deserves to go to jail, but it's this bystander jeering that sounds bad to me, that type of attitude can be turned against any one of us.
When I read the 2nd hand accounts of it, all I see are people making fun of a person who I see as autistic. That has made me not even read up on all the 2nd hand accounts, so I can't draw the more sweeping generalizations that you feel comfortable making. mea culpa
and any person is going to be more uncomfortable when questioned about the illegal parts. I'm simply saying that will exaggerate the autism experience and make him look extra guilty compared to a smooth talking guilty huckster.
I do believe he's guilty.
I'm not a medical professional, but he actually doesn't seem autistic to me. For one, he is rather socially and emotionally manipulative.
One needs to also remember that he is a drug addict. I'm sure it hasn't been easy being in jail becuase of that.
(FWIW, I agree with pretty much the rest of your points.)
This is precisely why you shut up, and plead the fifth. You'll be eviscerated on cross-examination when you don't.
Although in his case, he probably should have pled guilty, and begged for mercy, instead.
Splitting hairs over definitions and genie-like interpretations of what sentences mean isn't smart, it's annoying most of the time.
This is why you never should talk about being "the smartest person in the room". Because if you're that kind of person, you will inevitably try to show your genius work, and it will always be severely lacking.
I'm sorry, but you were not the smartest person in the room. You fail to understand what a prosecutor does and why, and you fail to understand what makes good testimony.
Maybe you had the highest amount of raw brain power in the court room, but with no intellectual curiosity or humility, that's like running the fastest CPU with no cooling on an unstable power supply.
I have no intellectual curiosity? omg you are pathetic. I'm the only person in that situation (including the attorneys) who had read all the of the voluminous bylaws and researched every aspect of the parts that I did not understand because IANAL. And I did all that way before any of this dispute came up, simply because I am intellectually curious. I was the previous President, I knew all the players, I know what they read and did not read.
When the disputes came up, I knew how the rules dictated they be handled. Other shareholders came to me and asked for my help because they knew I knew. Smarter people than you will always outfox you by knowing the rules better than you. It's more gentlemanly for you to take your L than to look for some tiny thing to crow about that is essentially off topic.
- Is the system rigged? Yes. - Are laws written by mediocre people hence full of loopholes? Yes. - Are most people in the Justice system mediocre? Yes, to the best of my knowledge your honor. - Is Justice != Law application? Yes, greatest marketing scam calling it Justice Department. - Is SBF a scammer that had a chip on his shoulder and got rich off other peoples money? All signs point to yes. - Does he deserved to be in jail? In SBF words, “Yep”.
Mate, I don’t question your intellect or memory, surely you are God - even in a forum where there is no lack of bright people - but your emotional intelligence is severely handicapped, so much that the “functional” part of your self description falls into doubt. You come across as the Simpsons comic store guy. Chill.
Guy once told me his job was to write some law in Spain, or for the EU, or somewhere in between. He submits his writings to his bosses, who tell him (paraphrased): "it's too clear, too watertight. Go back and make it more ambiguous." So he did.
It’s like hiring a web design firm and then showing up with a complete mockup - give them room to work.
smart autistic people have trouble communicating with people who are not precise in a venue which pretends to insist on precision, and here's a vivid example showing how innocent things can go wrong
and you think afterward you need to reiterate the attitude people have that triggered me to write in the first place. Yes, I know. Now read my story, it's a response to what you said, with details that can be discussed which you've ignored, details you should quote as a response rather than just telling me what I already know.
I didn't say I was the smartest person in the room to imply that "everybody should listen to me". I said it to ensure the reader that the troubles that ensued in the story were not due to me being unable to follow what was going on. I followed it, it made no sense without context that they were denying me. It would make no sense to anybody paying attention, but clarification was not possible.
But nowhere in your vast and vaunted store of EQ-that-I-am-lacking do you find any empathy for me and my experience. You just have the urge to tell me I'm wrong, it's my fault, etc. I'm submitting your response as further evidence of my point.
Out of curiosity, were you given the option of giving a deposition instead of taking the witness stand?
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Random boredom-browsing took me to this article: https://www.gu.se/en/gnc/defendants-with-autism-spectrum-dis...
> A defendant with ASD may shift the topic of the court discussions to a topic which is of interest to them and it can be difficult for anyone to interrupt them. The interest may be one of the individual’s preoccupations. Jurors may perceive this behaviour as an indication that the defendant is deliberately being evasive and trying to avoid answering the question that has been asked of them. As mentioned earlier, they may also go into excessive and unnecessary detail (and often at great length) when asked a question. Their responses may, in addition to being detailed and lengthy, it can also be repetitive
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Like most of us here, I've got ASD too - and I've been in court too, though only once, as a small-claims plaintiff (with a no-show defendent and got a default judgement against someone with a negative net-worth, fun...); and yeah, I remember putting a lot of details into what I said in court - but I thought it was all relevant (still, the judge said I would have won anyway even if it wasn't a default judgement...).
But yeah - if I was was ever a criminal defendent, the prosecution would probably let me talk myself into a trap - or something. Stuff like that makes me think I should intentionally play-up the autism instead of trying to act normal, to clearly demonstrate to the jury that I'm far more of a social-idiot than a cold sociopath.
"Most"?
Sometimes judges will hive off a piece of a case to "a special master" or something like that, to answer a subsidiary question. This was such a thing, the person presiding was a retired judge, and he has "powers" (like kicking me out if I continued to not say "yes or no", which kills my case because I'm the one making the complaint) and his purview was answering the question of whether the petitions had been properly served. All parties to the suit were there, but it was not in a court, and there was no "stand", we all sat around a table. I suppose it was something like a deposition, but the master was there and my attorney was not free to argue directly with their attorney.
This piece of the story is also a big bowl of horribly unfair spaghetti. Wanna hear it?
There is no such thing as "service" or "serving" where a shareholder petition is concerned, there's no standard for it, it's not a thing. You could do it by mail, etc. because the officers are your fiduciaries and they are to look out for your interests.
As it stood, by total coincidence, when I went to the front desk where paperwork like an actual service would be handled, the "mailing address" so to speak, who is standing right there but the president of the board! So I smiled and said "I've got petitions for you", which she was well aware my group had been collecting, they just thought we'd never make it over the hump. She went cold and like wouldn't take the envelope, was holding her hands away, and told me to leave it at the desk, the desk she was standing by. So I did.
Then she started inventing reasons why these petitions had not been served properly (they were served the way she told me to). In her deposition, this event turned into me "lying in wait, angrily physically assaulting her with the envelope". I was not angry: nobody thought we could get enough signatures but we did, I was positively giddy. I wasn't even showing my inner Nelson, "HAA-HAA", that's what I was covering up with my smile.
In any case: to repeat, there is no standard for service, it's not a thing. But the way we delivered them was the way service would be made. She is also my fiduciary who was obligated to look after my shareholder rights. It cost me about $250,000 in attorney fees to just cover this piece of the case. How can an overfull court system claim that this is something that must be looked into? They had to invent reasons to look into it.
All entirely separate from further time and money wasting whether what we were petitioning was something we could petition (it was, to call a shareholder meeting) and what is allowed to come to the floor at a shareholder meeting (you know who decides that, who courts won't override? shareholders, and they'd be at the meeting) and we were explicitly petitioning to remove board members at the meeting, another of our enumerated rights in the by-laws. We did not have the right to call an election, but all board members being removed triggers an election under a separate clause so... if you're going to make up a standard, it's so easy to see this should be thrown to the shareholders.
The board was simply throwing up one implausible excuse after another to avoid calling the meeting. So many legal questions which weren't even legal questions, for this type of corporation there are no standards for any of it, but the court was entertaining far flung notions borrowing ideas from other facets of industry as sort of frontier justice or something.
It should have been a slam dunk, I don't know why the court didn't just order a meeting immediately because meetings are easy to hold, it's not a big deal, and no matter what, the shareholders were both the affected parties and the arbiters, so why not just let them have a meeting?
oh, the attorney lady was an employment law attorney, and I know of another incident where she claimed somebody had assaulted her with documents. I have a feeling that's her modus operandi in employment lawsuits "they were angry, they might have done anything". Disgusting. And equally disgusting to spend a million in shareholder money trying not to have a shareholder meeting.
No you just do what your lawyer says, and perhaps that will form part of the defence. But this was Sam's problem, being so confident he was smarter than the lawyers when in this domain he was half an idiot.
My lawyer did not anticipate that when he showed me photocopies and asked me "are these the petitions" that I would answer "no they are not". I don't know the standards of the law, "photocopy just as good", and it's second nature to him. I actually fear perjuring myself; my opponent, an attorney completely did not.
I've been in several large lawsuits. My attorneys like working with me, I am incredibly diligent, I research everything I can, I come up with ideas they didn't think of, and most importantly, I seek and follow all of their advice and never mention a peep about the case, etc.
my lawyer still got me into hot water by not preparing for these questions becaused they seemed obvious to him, and the system jumped on board.
I have watched a lot of hours of court cases. The adversarial lawyers are very literally trying to get you to screw up verbally. That’s their job. They could hold of a picture of an apple and say “is this an apple, yes or no.” Or even “is this a photograph of an apple yes or no?” And depending on what they mean the answer could be both.
I stopped reading after that
to explain this, first I need to give some background, then I'll reply wrt SBF
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I'm "high functioning" autistic, I have testified in a court, and I have been rebuked by the judge for not "doing it right", and I can safely say I was the smartest person in the room, in sole possession of most of the facts, with a more detailed memory than anybody there, and I was not trying to lie or equivocate in any way; Their questions are ridiculous and they exist in a loaded framework that is impossible for a smart detailed person to navigate. I'll give an example or two:
"Did Susie Q. sign this position in your presence?" (and I had just been been rebuked for straying from yes or no)
If I say "no" or "I don't know" then my side of the case is harmed. If I say "yes" my side is maybe helped, but not by much, Susie Q's name is on the lawsuit itself, it's not like there's a question as to her loyalties. And I think, but I don't know because I'm not an attorney, that the question is perfunctory; but I had been completely screwed earlier by a perfunctory question, and I'm not allowed to ask "what is the spirit of this question", it's only yes or no.
But here's the thing: Susie Q signed 7 petitions, 2 of them in my presence, the others not. I know this because I tabulated the petitions. Whether I witnessed them or not, I can't tell this petition apart from any of the others, I retained all of them, but only "petitioned" one of them.
So, should I say "yes" in the spirit of the question? what if the deck is loaded and they know this particular one is not one that I have any knowledge of, and now I'm perjuring myself? Did Susie Q. sign this petition in my presence?
There were dozens of questions like this, questions that normies think are reasonable, but a person who is specific seems as incredibly ambiguous and wants to clarify in order to answer honestly, and clarifying is considered to be derailing justice.
Earlier my own attorney asked me if the whole stack of petitions in front of him were the ones that I submitted. I said no, they are not. The other side moved to end the lawsuit right there. There was no going back, no clarifying.
I said they were not the petitions I submitted because the signatures were collected on a 2 part form, a (top) signed petition, (a cut right here xxxx line) and an independent (bottom) signed separable proxy vote. I sliced the two halves of the sheets apart because the petitions were for one aspect of an upcoming proceeding, and the proxies were for a different aspect; what I was shown were photocopies of all the two part forms intact, but literally not the separated original petitions that I had submitted. Yes or no, are these the petitions? Don't perjure yourself and no do-overs.
Luckily my attorney came up with a way to "get them into evidence" some other way, but "are these the petitions" was "asked and answered".
the system is rigged (in favor of the machine doing whatever it wants) and that I pissed the judge off by trying to tell the truth was beyond enraging, when sitting before me as respondent was an attorney who was actually lying. (respondent is civil defendant, not counsel for defendant)