Is Roger Ver punished for 10 months in Prison Because of his Speech? http://voluntaryist.com/howibecame/rogerver.html#.W9gtcuKYNhF Is there a precedent? He claimed that others doing the same thing are given a slap on the wrist and only him get sent to jail. How exactly the law works in Roger Ver's case? Are there any other real reason why Roger got 10 months in prison? It was basically a firecracker used by farmers to scare deer and birds away from their corn fields. While everyone else, including the manufacturer, were simply asked to stop selling them I became the only person in the nation to be prosecuted. The reasoning for the prosecution became crystal clear after a meeting with the US prosecuting attorney and the under cover ATF agents from the debate. In the meeting, my attorney told the prosecutor that selling store-bought firecrackers on Ebay isn�t a big deal and that we can pay a fine and do some community service to be done with everything. When the prosecutor agreed that that sounded reasonable one of the ATF agents pounded his hand on the table and shouted ��but you didn�t hear the things that he said!� This summed up very clearly that they were angry about the things that I had said, not the things that I had done. Is what Roger Ver said true? Is it reasonable or likely to be true? For example, is there a pattern where those that love freedom are more likely to be screwed by justice system in US? \ There is a discussion here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=120969.0 It seems that many people easily buy such firecrackers through post and is doing just fine.
Maybe, but we'll probably never know for sure. Officially, of course, he was not punished for his speech. He was punished for selling explosives without a license, which he admitted to. (He was also charged with illegally storing explosives and illegally mailing 'injurious material," but those charges were dropped in exchange for his guilty plea on the first count.) Whether those charges were a pretext to retaliate is probably unknowable. While it's a well-known fact that law enforcement frequently retaliates against people for exercising their right to free speech, this guy's story doesn't sound very credible. There is precedent for a prosecution for distributing Pest Control Report 2000, including the prosecution of white supremacist Leo Felton, a sad-sack loser who used the same material to build a bomb around to incite a "racial holy war" the same time. And just about a month after Ver's conviction, the man who owned the company that manufactured the product was convicted of violating federal explosives and transportation laws. Several months after that, he and his company entered into a consent decree with the Consumer Product Safety Commission ordering them to stop manufacturing Pest Control Report 2000.
The life sentences were based on counts 2 and 4, distribution of narcotics by means of the internet and continuing criminal enterprise. In reviewing the sentencing hearing, all of the evidence indicates that the sentence was based on the nature of his acts, and not anything he did after his arrest. There is no way to know if prosecutors would have been amenable to a plea bargain.
For Mr. Petersen, the questions in general should have been elementary. The fact he did not know them is actually quite deplorable. To your questions specifically: Should Mr. Petersen, as a Juris Doctor, know of those things in his sleep? This is the wrong question. The question is: should an individual who has accepted a nomination to serve as a federal judge on the U.S. District Court know of those things in his/her sleep? The answer is unequivocally yes. One could almost argue - one would likely be scoffed at, but one could - that an appointment to a higher court, the U.S. Circuit, could get away not knowing those things 'in his/her sleep,' because appeals courts would not deal with, e.g., abstention doctrines or whether to admit expert scientific testimony, as often as a trial court does. Simply put, lawyers should at least have heard of those things (he looked/sounded absolutely dumbfounded at the words that were being said to him), litigators should know them, and federal trial court judges absolutely need to know those things to do the job. Is his excuse valid when he says that he has no background in the field(s) (he mentioned litigation once) the terms are corresponding to? If he was just some lawyer talking to some guy at a bar, sure, totally valid. If someone is a corporate M&amp;A or project finance attorney, sure, don't expect him to win any trial court vocabulary contests. However, when sitting before a panel of U.S. Senators carrying out their Constitutional duties of "advice and consent" on presidential appointments, not knowing those things can, should, and indeed did end in complete humiliation for the person ignorant enough to try and go through with that. I'm sure his hearing was scheduled some time in advance. The fact he obviously made zero attempt to know anything is actually insulting to everyone involved. For context, I wrote a motion in limine at my first internship. If I live to be 1,000 and never step foot in a court room, I'll still be able to say more about a motion in limine than "I would probably not be able to give you a good definition right here at the table."
Under United States law, it is not illegal to simply make an account on a forum where criminal activity takes place. The closest thing I can think of would be misprision of felony (AKA failure to report a crime), which requires active concealment (see United States v. Johnson, 546 F.2d 1225 (5th Cir. 1977)). Simply observing evidence of criminal activity and not reporting it would not qualify. However, if that forum also contains material that is illegal to posses (such as child sexual abuse material), downloading that (even by simply viewing it using your browser) could be a crime. I would note that I am specifically not advising you whether or not doing any of the other things, like making and publishing tutorial videos on how to access such sites, is likely to get you into trouble with the law. If you want that sort of legal advice, you should contact a lawyer, as the advice is going to be very specific to the exact details.
In this specific case and location, the precise location of the incident was explicitly made a public space via state law not too long before this actual event. They therefore most certainly have no right to privacy. What is interesting to me though is the other side of this, does someone have the right to record others in public spaces, or is it simply not illegal? For instance if I non-destructively and non-violently "jam" your camera by shooting a low-power IR beam at your lens, have I abridged a legal right of yours? I don't think it would be illegal to do this. I am not even positive its against the 1st Amendment. The 1st Amendment relates only to the dissemination of information, not the collection of it. The Constitution doesn't seem to compel the gov't to make information available, or even to make things/events/spaces observable. The various "sunshine" laws after-all had to be enacted, it wasn't part of an interpretation of the 1st Amendment. To put a finer point on it, is recording events in public spaces legal or merely lawful?
According to Blackmail Overview :: Justia (emphasis mine): A blackmailer typically has information that is damaging to the victim, and uses threats to reveal that information in order to coerce the victim. Blackmail is considered a crime regardless of whether the information is true or false. The central element of the crime is the blackmailer’s intent to obtain money, property, or services from the victim with threats of revealing the information. So it's still a crime, at least in the US. But the enforcement problems are tracing the original emailer, which, due to (I assume) multiple email relay IPs, address spoofing, etc, and the big issue of identifying the actual individual who pressed the metaphorical "send" key on the bulk email script, the jurisdiction of that person, etc. As Ron pointed out, BitcoinWhosWho shows no one has fallen for it, even though millions of these emails get sent every day, gauging from the number that I get myself.
Barela was convicted of robbery affecting interstate commerce and faces a sentence of up to 20 years and $250,000 in fines. I assume your issue is that you think this is too high (although I don't see what it has to do with the 14th or 6th Amendments). Fortunately, it's also almost completely unrelated to the actual sentence. The number that was quoted is the statutory maximum for robbery or extortion affecting interstate commerce. It represents the maximum amount that any defendant under any circumstances could receive for one count of that crime. A career criminal who threatened to kill an armored car guard in order to steal $10,000,000 would face the same 20-year statutory maximum as someone with no record who threatened to give COVID to a store clerk in order to steal $90. In some situations, things like the amount stolen or the defendant's criminal record affect the actual crime the defendant is convicted of. At the federal level, that's mostly not the case. Robbery affecting interstate commerce doesn't have degrees or statutory enhancements. Instead, a judge decides what sentence is appropriate. The judge can, in theory, pick anything between the statutory minimum (here there is none) and the statutory maximum (here it's 20 years). 18 U.S. Code § 3553 lays out the factors for the court to consider. In practice, federal courts generally sentence within the range given in the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. While the statute itself doesn't distinguish between stealing $90 by threatening to cough and stealing millions by threatening to shoot, the Guidelines do. Courts don't have to follow the Guidelines range but typically do. If they don't, it's much more likely their sentence will be overturned as unreasonable on appeal. Popehat has a good blog post on the Guidelines, how they work, and why press releases quoting statutory maximums are basically straight-up lies. Sentencing.us has an unofficial calculator you can use to estimate the Guidelines range for a particular crime. If you plug in 18 U.S. Code § 1951 (which translates to the &quot;Robbery&quot; guideline) and enter in $90 stolen, no weapon used, no threat of death, and no criminal record, then you get a range of 33-41 months and/or a fine of $7,500 to $75,000. This is basically the lowest Guidelines range possible for robbery. For comparison, under California state law robbery is punishable by two, three, or five years in state prison. Robbery is a serious and violent crime, so a sentence of multiple years would not be considered unreasonable. But it takes a lot for the Guidelines range to approach the statutory maximum of 20 years.
I don’t believe there is an aggravated violation due to his disability, but it is quite likely that a court will find that to be a violation of his rights. Florida’s stop and frisk law 901.151(2) would indicate the original stop and temporary detention was valid, but once the item in his back pocket had been identified, 901.151(3) requires that the detention be immediately terminated. After the identification, he was no longer being legally detained, it was thus either an illegal detention and a violation of his 4th amendment rights or a consensual encounter under Florida law, and if consensual no requirement to Id. But just because it was a violation of his rights doesn’t mean that he will automatically win a lawsuit if he brings one. Jones v. State, 584 So.2d 190 (Fla. 5th DCA 1991) holds that you can’t be charged with resisting arrest without violence (aka 843.01), when the arrest itself is unlawful. I suppose Hodges could be charged with “obstructing” which is covered by the same statue, but more ambiguous than “arrest”.