Jailed Spam King Caught Conspiring to Kill Witness

An anonymous reader writes "Spam king Christopher William Smith, aka Rizler, is facing up to life in prison for conspiracy to tamper with a witness and up to 20 years for endeavoring to obstruct justice. The charges are based on an alleged phone call in which he threatened to have a witness or the witness' family killed to prevent them from testifying against him in an upcoming trial on drug and related charges.

Comments

His spamming and this incident seem unrelated

[metlin]

I could be wrong, but his spamming and his current indictment seem unrelated.

From the article:

"Although Smith allegedly built his pharmacy business from spam-related profits, it doesn't appear that Smith actually sent spam to advertise the pharmacy sites. Witnesses told investigators that he bought ads in magazines and had sales reps field calls at the Burnsville, MN offices of Online Payment Solutions."

And from a previous article on him, it would seem that he spammed stuff different from his pharmacy biz.

The latter seems to be the reason he tried silencing a witness, and it was for something that seems to be unrelated to his spamming biz.

Re:His spamming and this incident seem unrelated

[Khyber]

Ya know what else? Prison rape doesn't happen NEARLY as often as TV portrays. I went thru Mississippi's penal system. Raping someone adds another 20 years to your sentence for destruction of state property. The only people raping anyone are D-row and lifers that don't have a thing to lose, and guess what? about 90% of them are in solitary confinement.

Re:His spamming and this incident seem unrelated

[utlemming]

Acording to http://www.spr.org/ 1 in 5 men and 1 in 4 women are raped while in prision.

I went and looked up the Federal Sentencing Guidelines http://www.ussc.gov/2004guid/tabcon04_1.htm Turns out, for a raping another prisioner or even a correctional officer raping prision you get 32 points. (FYI: each crime is weighted on a point scale. Each crime has a base point and then you can get "extra credit" to increase the points based on the actual details of the crime.) If you are first time offendor serving a time for a pervious crime, then you're looking at between 11 and 13 years for a prision rape. If you are serious offendor, then plan somewhere in the neighborhood of about 22 years for raping someone. Federal law, btw, makes prision rape a federal crime.

While everyone is being brutal about the GP for saying that you get 20 years for doing prision rape, according to the sentencing guidelines, which Federal Judges are bound to, then 20 years would sound right. That would be enough for anyone with the hope of getting out not to do it. Also, since it is a sex crime, then the prisioner upon release for committing prision rape would have to register as a sex offendor. Now the idiot that got his jollies on his cell mate won't be able to get a job because he'll be labeled a felon and a pervert.

And that is just on the federal level.

Re:This is news?

[flyingsquid]

Nobody has been tortured to death recently in Iraq. If you want that you need to go back a few years to the days of Saddam. I know you were making a joke, but do not confuse the US humilation of prisoners with Saddam's actual honest-to-god death-inducing torture.

Some prisoners definitely were tortured to death by U.S. forces in Iraq. From one of Seymour Hersh's pieces: "Two Iraqi faces that do appear in the photographs are those of dead men. There is the battered face of prisoner No. 153399, and the bloodied body of another prisoner, wrapped in cellophane and packed in ice. There is a photograph of an empty room, splattered with blood." So yes, some of it was "honest-to-god death-inducing torture." Prisoners were also tortured to death in Afghanistan. Get your facts straight.

I know this is a bit off the topic of the discussion, but it just pisses me off when people try to whitewash the behavior of the Bush Administration, and offer pathetic excuses like "we didn't torture people as much as Saddam Hussein". Here's a hint: if the only way to put your country's behavior in a positive light is by drawing a comparison to a psychotic, sadistic, murderous dictator, your country is doing something really, really fucked up and wrong.

The Seventh Amendment...

[Elemenope]

The 7th only guarantees a jury trial in civil actions. You were thinking of the due process protections of the fifth, sixth, and fourteenth.

Re:You are one-hundred percent full of shit.

[evilviper]

no formal study has ever been comissioned to study the subject,

I must have imagined this one: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-01-17-pri son-rape_x.htm