[dragonwriter]

> Your comment is factually incorrect. In no universe is anyone getting 10 years in federal court for killing a person.

If you mean “no one will get that much for any criminal homicide”, you are wrong.

But if instead you mean “no one will get that little for any criminal homicide”, you are also wrong, as involuntary manslaughter has a statutory maximum, forget even the guidelines ranges, of less than that.

[maximinus_thrax]

> Federal law provides that someone convicted of involuntary manslaughter may face up to eight years in federal prison, but the base sentence for the crime under federal sentencing guidelines is a prison sentence of 10-16 months.

For the Lacey Act:

> For an individual, the criminal penalties are not more than 1 year in prison and a fine of $100,000 or twice the gross gain or loss. For a corporation the criminal penalties are not more than 5 years of probation and fine of $200,000 or twice the gross gain or loss. Restitution and forfeitures may also be imposed.

> If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years,

So, I don't understand where either you or OP are coming from. The intention is to paint the government as the irrational Bogeyman who's going to lock you up and throw away the keys when you 'lie about some animals', the same as when you kill a person. This is not correct, unless if you take the maximum for violating the Lacey Act and the minimum for manslaughter, basically using the extremes and calling it normal. Like some sort of 'Appeal to Extremes' fallacy.

So, to recap, OP said:

> You lied about the type of sheep you're bringing in? 5 years by 2 counts.

Wrong. It's 'no more than 5 years'. You really need to be on the far end of the spectrum to get the maximum sentence for something like this, which is usually punished by a fine + probation.

> Kill a guy, that's 10 years.

Wrong again, the minimum bar for killing a person is involuntary manslaughter which has a minimum of 10-month imprisonment (so there's no probation in the guidelines, it's a minimum imprisonment sentence) and a maximum of 8 years. If we're talking about murder in the first degree, then it's either life in prison or capital punishment.

[armatav]

And so the ceiling being 5 years per count here seems rational to you because it's in the guidelines, and "no one is actually going to get that". Which is exactly my point.

The rationale here seems to be that if we give a large enough entity enough leeway with the lives of its constituents, then anything less than the extremes of punishment is necessarily morally righteous because they were not the subject of the minimum or maximum punishment - punishment that the large-enough-entity was indeed capable of giving them because of that leeway - but kind enough instead to apply "the law" which necessitates punishment somewhere between the extremes.

Which is exactly the point of "guidelines" being super high in the first place - so that you can be a subject of anything in-between the floor and the worst imaginable, and people can turn around and feel just about it, because they are not its subject.

My point is no one should be seeing even a year in prison as their punishment for essentially smuggling sheep, it has nothing to do with federal sentencing guidelines, the argument is from a moral perspective - it biases the punishment upwards and then allows the court to assert any fine or damages below that amount but vastly above what it would be if the maximum was not five years per count.