Description

Last Thursday, Judge Lewis Kaplan sentenced Sam Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison.  Some think that’s an appropriate result.  Some think it should have been more.

But this sentence far more than necessary to meet the goals of sentencing.  The bigger problem is, there were likely missed opportunities to convince the Judge that justice demanded a lower sentence for Sam. 

Therefore, here is the straight scoop on SBF’s sentencing (we have the full transcript) and the larger problems it reveals about federal sentencing and beyond.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• Judge Kaplan’s “tip of the cap” to the insurrectionists;
• The missed opportunity to present powerful sentencing statistics, including average federal sentences for murder, kidnaping, sexual abuse, and child pornography;
• Judge Kaplan’s explicit comments regarding broken guidelines;
• Autism Spectrum Disorder – the (largely ignored) elephant in the room;
• SBF’s sentence compared to  (spoiler alert, his sentence is HIGHER than all of ‘em);
• The missed opportunity of highlighting a LIFE EXPECTANCY analysis at sentencing;
• The missed opportunity to tell the story of BOP classification issues;

LINKS:

Ep. 73: Sam Bankman-Fried: Is Autism the Missing Piece of Mitigation?

https://youtu.be/jkh6eEkvBRg?si=qXJxNu4SBKCqTWEq