I wish that US law enforcement, who likes to act all tough when dealing with helpless poor people, would instead act tough with white collar criminals. Instead of taking their fake SWAT team units into twitch streamers homes and to schools where they sit there and let kids get murdered, imagine them storming into Theranos and yanking them straight to jail, and then having a speedy trial, rather than wasting years of our tax dollars to slap them on the wrist.
Unfortunately, law enforcement organisations have always existed to protect the interests of the wealthy and powerful. Individual officers and agents may (may!) have empathy for the little person, but their employers have a different agenda.
Seems to me like 'defrauding some of the most powerful people in the world, misdiagnosing serious diseases, and harassing a whistleblower to the point where he killed himself' is an awfully high bar to clear in order for white-collar crime to be taken seriously. They fined Jammie Thomas, like, $800,000 dollars for downloading 30 songs off of napster or whatever. As far as I know, she didn't get to plead 'inability to pay'.
I think GP makes a totally valid point. Big companies only get punished hard when they defraud powerful people, normal people get punished hard for doing something a company doesn't like.
It really does seem the harshest punishments are handed out for hurting people/companies more powerful than you. The rich and powerful, including corporations, should be held more accountable. Instead, the law seems to get used mostly to keep people in their place.
I still remember how HSBC got fined millions for laundering billions for Mexican drug cartels. Normal people would be doing hard time if they did that. Banks get fined less than the size of the crime.
Let's not forget things like the Sackler family's relentless marketing of addictive opiates. They and their expensive retainers get to have lofty discussions about this and that, whether a particular settlement number is _fair_ or in the 'best interests of the patients' or whatever, how the very idea of litigation is hurting their ability to help those who really need it.
Contrast that with the tone taken by our most powerful, about the scourge of illegal immigrants bring the very same chemicals into the country by swimming the Rio Grande. I would not be surprised to hear support for summary executions of every third person in Laredo, TX.
> maybe? will they get out early? when will they go?
I don’t know, but that is a question for behavior. I do believe in rehabilitation being the underlying goal of prison, so I’d be thrilled if they came out of it changed people.
> a guy selling cigarettes on the streets of NYC without a permit would have been choked to death in seconds. (actual thing that happened)
And that is awful. Never said I was defending that.
> seems like this justice imbalance in the USA is something we can get bipartisan support for changing. lets do it yall.
There's some guy out there doing this kind of thing without lawyers and wins every time, and is making a living on it. It was posted on HN some years ago.
The point is that if your potential earnings cap out at $10k there's a very good chance you're going to end up paying more in legal fees than you ever make in a settlement and leave yourself at a net loss.
The cost of losing is small and the cost of restarting again is small. Meanwhile, the potential upside of even one call netting a sale is very large. I reckon two calls netting sales would have paid for this fine.
We have hucksters abusing legitimate business structures. I think we need an “in good faith” escape clause for LLCs that captures folks that abuse them.
not authoritative, but general trend is ~ 40 plaintiff are acceptable minimum cohort for a class, but that can be even smaller, a class of 1 is feasible but very uncommon.
