Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gruez 556 days ago
>While I have trouble wrestling with the assertion as well, it does hold pretty true to the way the US justice system works. Sentencing is generally far harsher for financial crimes as $ goes up.

Right, but only for financial crimes. You're not going to get off murder by saying you only got $100 for the hit.
1 comments
capybaraStorm 555 days ago
If you sell a few hits of fentanyl you aren't going to meet the statutory definition of a criminal enterprise and therefore will not be eligible for federal death penalty even though fentanyl induces death.

If you sell $100M of fentanyl you can get the death sentence, since fentanyl is an element in inducing death at basically any sufficiently large quantity of a criminal enterprise.

It is not exactly the same, but it has a lot of parallels to the argument I see here. If you are an insurance salesman selling contracts you know will not be honored and such denied claims will be an element of death, many will not see it as serious as being the criminal enterprise leader who orchestrated it. Even in such case that the policy can be attributed to a single salesman, the executive is likely to be held more culpable just as the US code holds the criminal enterprise executive to the death penalty whereas it may not hold the low level guy who sold the fentanyl.

link
s1artibartfast 555 days ago
Drug dealing isnt a financial crime
link
capybaraStorm 555 days ago
The government has had a very hard time classifying what type of crime drug dealing is. First they said it was a tax crime (well before that, an import or tariff crime). Then the 10th amendment was basically gutted, and it became a crime where all the facts could be identical to a pharmacy dispensing a script, but sans paying for a DEA license.

It is definitely a very strange one. The classical liberalism argument is that the most prominent aspect remains essentially a financial crime of failure to pay the licensing tax.

link
gruez 555 days ago
>and it became a crime where all the facts could be identical to a pharmacy dispensing a script, but sans paying for a DEA license.

That describes a bunch of crimes? If you raid a drug dealer's house and kill a bunch of people in the process, you'll go to jail. If it's the police doing it with a "license" (ie. a warrant), it's suddenly fine. More banal is you driving along, following all applicable laws and causing no issues, but if you're doing it without a license or insurance, it's suddenly illegal.

link
capybaraStorm 555 days ago
Yes of course. All of this seems to me totally psychotic and not at all a dystopia I want to live in. Which is why I lived in an area with almost no government, very weak police services, little to no code/zone enforcement, weak environmental controls, etc etc.

I pointed it out largely because I find the drug laws to be particularly strange.

link