Yeah, that's a surprising thing for him to say, since he's generally one of the loudest voices against this "add up the sentences" stuff. The grouping rules are in the sentencing guidelines too! Go look!
He was just responding to this paragraph in the NPR article:
> Holmes' sentencing date has not yet been set. But she faces the maximum penalty of 20 years behind bars, though legal experts say she will likely face a lesser punishment.
That is, he wasn't arguing that she will serve the max of 65, just that the max is much higher than what NPR reported.
It's not surprising, because there's a very good argument that the guideline range for what she has been convicted of (and taking into account her conduct at trial, which is relevant) is life, with the actual sentence capped at the statutory maximum of the offenses stacked consecutively rather than concurrently.
Now, it's possible that the court wouldn't agree with that analysis and find slightly fewer points, or that it would agree but would make a downward departure, but...
For another, because the guidelines are pretty specific in this case --- that 2B1.1 crimes are charged according to --- well, here's the wording from the guidelines: "the applicable base offense level is determined by the count of conviction that provides the highest statutory maximum term of imprisonment.". So "3x20" seems off the table.
The thing here is, you get up to around 20 years just with a single wire fraud count, because the amounts involved here are so high. We're at $143MM in losses on the three wire fraud charges together (2B1.1 states they're to be summed up), which gets you a 26(!)-level enhancement from the base level of 7. That's 12 years (at the bottom of the range), and every other enhancement you take after level 33 is another ~4 years; there are 3-4 enhancements (like "sophisticated means") that seem likely to apply.
On the flip side, given the huge sums involved, it's not easy to make the numbers make sense served consecutively.
Yes there's lots of very high and very low guesses as to what she might get going around. I'm just commenting here specifically on this twitter guy's opinion.
> Holmes' sentencing date has not yet been set. But she faces the maximum penalty of 20 years behind bars, though legal experts say she will likely face a lesser punishment.
That is, he wasn't arguing that she will serve the max of 65, just that the max is much higher than what NPR reported.