It boggles the mind that it's even possible to manufacture such a charge. In most European countries you would get the highest sentence for the biggest crime, which although wouldn't be "accurate" either, it's a whole lot closer to what the punishment should be than stacking the sentences up.
And please spare me the "but he would never get this sentence anyway!" argument. If you were in his position and the government would tell you you're risking 80 years in prison unless you fully cooperated with it, you'd shit your pants, too, and you'd probably give up any rights you have just to not risk getting anywhere close to that sentence, or you would even settle and plead guilty to avoid that.
The fact is that "pleading not guilty" is statistically the "biggest" crime you can commit in much of the US (meaning the one you are likely to be punished for most severely). Which of course makes a mockery of most of the protections of the law.
See also:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/why-inn...
Or
"In some jurisdictions, this gap has widened so much it has become coercive and is used to punish defendants for exercising their right to trial, some legal experts say."
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/us/tough-sentences-help-pr...
Well, y'see, you were accused of a crime. If you don't admit you are guilty and save us the trouble of due process, well, you'll be punished more severely than if you bent over nice and quick for good ol' Uncle Sam.
Its basically a way for prosecutors to pressure people into plea bargains. It helps them maintain their 90%+ conviction rates.
1. The issues are orthogonal. You can simply raise the minimum sentence attached to rape, whether you stack sentences or not.
2. The punishment is almost entirely irrelevant. What matters is the recidivism rate. This may just be a difference in morals. I believe the justice system exists to protect society and reintegrate criminals into it, or keep them out if they are not salvageable. I do not believe revenge has a place in the justice system. An eye for an eye makes everyone go blind.
Makes much more sense than labelling people as sex offenders in my opinion.
Quite the contrary - in 2013, 97% of federal cases that weren't dismissed ended in a plea bargain: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/why-inn...
> And federal sentencing is pretty rigid, so he probably would have served ~80 years.
No - in fact there's no way the Sentencing Guidelines would have given a sentence anywhere near 80 years: http://popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence-ele...
On the local level plea agreements are used to make prosecuting people cheaper, if you don't agree to it they'll pretty much fuck you up intentionally just to prove a point which is probably even worse than not having the ability to offer them in the first place.
However, the indictment gives a couple hints on this topic. There are multiple mentions of FISA and CIPA, US laws dealing with national security and spying. Perhaps the US was spying on the people Xi was communicating with?
You can read the indictment here: https://cryptome.org/2015/09/xiaoxing-xi-files.pdf
All of this seems like overkill for what was supposedly a violation of an NDA.
Did they really burst into his home, armed -- arms drawn? -- and handcuff him in front of his children? Was that necessary?
I don't know enough about the case to speak to the charges themselves -- and I'm confident that, regardless of Xi's individual circumstances, there is plenty of espionage going on [1] -- but I have to wonder at yet another incident that appears to insist upon storm trooper tactics -- followed I presume by a publicity motivated perp walk.
[1] And why don't we pursue further all the production agreements where the Chinese use their economic leverage (politically prescribed and enabled cheaper production costs) to coerce domestic production as a condition of participation in their domestic sector and trade, whereupon they examine and copy the relevant technology, including supposedly restricted high technology components, wholesale.
Who's knocking on the door of e.g. the CEO of Hughes?
Who's publicly displaying those who've grossly mismanaged compromised high value information systems?
Each case like this just further disillusions me with respect to what increasingly appears to be primarily the Federal government's ongoing dog and pony show of law enforcement.
Back to the SWAT teams and perp walks. I no longer see quiet competence on display. Rather, more and more political grandstanding.
I remember buying some computer kit and it came with about 20 pages of legal docs saying who we where not allowed to re export to and what the legal penalties where
https://www.reddit.com/r/Temple/comments/36w3df/cst_dean_mik...
Did they see schematics in an email and then made the wild assumption that it was nefarious? That seems absurd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla...
They basically accused him of being a Chinese Spy but instead charged him with Fraud. :|
The same type of failed wrongful convictions - typically involving people who are easy targets - as a result of rabid law enforcement and media fear mongering can be found in terrorism in 2000s, drugs in the 1980s-90s, biker gangs in the 60s-70s.
Instead of taking a logical and well-reasoned approach to the enforcement of legitimate societal problems history just keeps repeating itself.
