alt Hacker NewsWhat part of doesn't merit a prison sentence escapes you?
I'll take all 3. It really doesn't matter. I don't want this person going to prison in my name. A criminal case is supposed to represent the public interest. A free society is meant to set a high bar to deprive someone of their liberty. The streaming platform can sue him if they like. A civil case that results in punitive damages is also understandable.
In my view, incarceration in this instance is a disgrace. The argument is a moral one, not a legalistic one.
Perhaps the statutes around wire fraud should be reformed. IDK it's not my area, and my argument doesn't rely on a legalistic interpretation, rather it suggests if the law's answer here is to put this person in prison something is wrong with the law. That is the argument. You seem to be asking me how would I codify the solution or else you have misunderstood me.
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Did you miss the fact that the accounts he was streaming on were bot accounts created with stolen debit cards?
This was essentially money-laundering at scale.
It's true that the state has discretion on whether to pursue a crime, and this is apparently true for harder crimes like murder.
I guess the state prosecution just disagreed on this matter, I'm assuming that, within their specialty, they take the top N cases and dismiss the other pettier cases, and in this case this case made the cut according to the workload capacity of the fraud prosecution workforce.
In raw stolen amounts, it's not small at all, it's like 8 million dollars, which is an amount that can be argued to be worth one or two lives, it may be the cost of complex surgeries and health insurance, or the cost for good nutrition, living space, so it could be argued that this person is taking those resources away from someone else, no matter how inert or ridiculous the means by which they stole that money may be. If someone defrauds 500 million dollars by impersonating a clown, the optics of defrauding 500 million should prevail over the optics of "putting someone in jail for being a clown".
Your argument: If somebody robs a bank, they did not harm society, the bank can just sue them to recover the money.
Justice is supposed to make sense for society not for the uber wealthy. No prison sentence.