Slashdot Mirror
30 Years For Online Pharmacy Spammer
jotter507 writes "So, you get arrested for running an illegal online pharmacy and the judge orders you to stop selling medication over the Internet. Don't sit around and do nothing before the trial! Run off to the Dominican Republic on a false passport, withdraw money from an account ordered frozen, and start up another online 'pharmacy.' It didn't end well for 27-year old Christopher William Smith, also known as 'Rizler.' The world-reviled spammer and Internet drug dispenser received a 30-year sentence from a federal judge on Wednesday."
How was the perp able to withdraw money from a frozen account?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It is interesting what you say but I have to give you the other end of spectrum. I live in a country where the maximum penalty is 25 years. It really does not matter if you kill one person or 4 you will get at most 25 years.
Recently we had a case in the news where one guy killed 3 little girls, hid the evidence, tried to blame it on another guy and commited two or three more crimes, he got nailed with 25 years and the defence is appealing to try to reduce the time (unlikely, since the total time was around 60 years, even if they reduce somewhat it will still be over 25).
Now I believe, 25 years in jail is a long time. When you get out of there you sure did have some time to think about the things you've done and how to straighten up (of course, some never do). The real problem here is paroles, saw it on the news that although he got 25 years sentence, in some cases they get out on parole after 6 years, and hardly anyone gets more than 16 years or real jail time.
Now this starts to look short. So we either need to review the parole system or we need to start comulating penalties like in the US so that criminals do pay their time in jail. If one of the girls he killed was my daughter and he got out of jail in 6 years... oh boy, don't even want to imagine how I would feel and just how much I would be willing to do.
rm -rf /home/leia
"The purpose of punishment is not to exact vengeance -- it is to deter crimes and to comfort the victims."
Baloney. The purpose of punishment is punishment. Nothing, not a damn thing, deters crime.
Basically what we're talking about here is a type of compression algorithm. A person lives an average of 75 years, and for purposes of this discussion, let's assume the person is youngish, since they're more likely to commit crimes. Say 25 years. That means that a 50 year sentence is essentially the maximum useful sentence -- it is equivalent to life in prison. So the *worst* crime imaginable would map to this -- the one where you kill everyone in the world by sexually assaulting them with kittens and then peeing on their dead bodies while singing heavy metal ballads.
A proportional justice system means that anything less than this ultimate crime, should have a lesser sentence.
From there, it's just a question of how you map things -- is it linear or logarithmic with the severity of the crime (since causing a crash that injures two people is only 1/100000000 as bad as killing everyone in the world with kittens, should your sentence for doing this be only 1/100000000 as long as a life sentence, or only 1/1000?) What level of crime is sufficient that anything above it maps to life in prison? How much will that cost?
To the victim, any sentence probably seems too lenient, because the victim has been personally affected. The questions are: what is best for society as a whole, and what are we actually trying to do with imprisonment?
Fundamentalists (which I use in its original meaning) and many conservatives feel that criminality is permanent, and as such, prisons are primarily punishment, retribution, or a way of getting rid of criminals if we can't outright kill them. As a result, they tend to want very long prison sentences or the death penalty.
Progressives, and most liberals, feel that criminality is situational, and as such, prisons can be used for rehabilitation, so that once the sentence is served, with appropriate help and training, the person coming out is possibly no longer a criminal and can live a useful, productive, non-criminal life.
Basically, you have to ask yourself what you think prison is for. If it's for making people suffer for having done bad things, you're probably going to want long sentences and capital punishment. If it's for fixing broken people, you're probably going to favor shorter sentences and definitely going to favor education, job training, and self-advancement opportunities being offered in prisons. Victims of crime are naturally going to feel retributive towards the criminals who caused them suffering, and probably towards criminals in general. I personally think that one of the responsibilities of society at large is to approach crime with a neutral point of view, and make sentencing depend on what's best for society as a whole, rather than just to appease the feelings of the victim.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.