> ...he will likely spend the next two decades in prison for doing something that isn’t specifically forbidden by federal law.
He was prosecuted in a state he'd never set foot in, for doing something that wasn't against the law as contracted by people whose plans he did not know; and he was convicted, and sentenced to twice the term of the actual lawbreakers. That's not how the rule of law works.
First, there is nothing about the rule of law that says you can't be prosecuted in a state you've never been to. In this case, Anaya aided a criminal act that took place in Kansas. The fact that he's never personally been to Kansas is neither here nor there.
Second, the fact that a particular act might be legal does not mean that it is legal to do it in connection with a crime. There is nothing illegal about driving a car. There is something illegal about driving robbers in a car away from a crime scene.
Third, willful blindness is not a defense to any charge that requires showing knowledge. Anaya purposefully profited from criminal activity, and even if he didn't know the specifics of the plan, it's only because he purposefully tried to avoid learning of them. The law simply imposes a higher level of social responsibility than that.
Now, it's a fair criticism that drug enforcement is a waste of resources and drug sentences are too long. But that's quite a separate issue to the points you raise. Say that instead that Anaya was installing traps to help members of child prostitution rings convey cash around. The analysis of his involvement would be the same.
It is an important part of US law. In conspiracy cases, individuals may be prosecuted in any district in which an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy occurs, by any of the conspirators. In this case, some of his alleged co-conspirators trafficked drugs in Kansas.
In weev's case, the court rejected New Jersey as venue because no overt act in commission of the crime occurred in New Jersey, since neither weev nor the AT&T servers were in the state. The prosecutors argued that NJ was proper since many of the victims (AT&T customers) were in New Jersey, an argument the court didn't buy.
> First, there is nothing about the rule of law that says you can't be prosecuted in a state you've never been to.
It's certainly strongly implied. "Rule of law" implies that governments have clear geographic borders. It's ludicrous to suggest that every person must obey every law that exists anywhere in the world or fear prosecution.
> ""Rule of law" implies that governments have clear geographic borders."
Governments also have treaties. If geographic locations A and B have an extradition agreement, living in A will not protect you from prosecution/conviction/incarceration if you conspire with criminals to commit a crime in B. If the government of A receives the proper request (with whatever degree of evidence that government requires for extradition), it will arrest you and ship you to B to face charges. It happens that Kansas and California have an extradition agreement.
If you read the details of the appeal (others have posted it in these threads) it's clear the guy in the article knew he was conspiring to traffic drugs; you don't describe the volume of a space in "kilos" unless you're referencing a substance which is packed in standard-sized one-kilo packages which other people would catch the reference to if you made it. Whether or not you agree with the drug war in general, don't make this into something it's not by feigning ignorance on the guy's behalf.
I can't agree that the getaway driver scenario is analogous. The difference is attenuation from the illegal act. The getaway drive directly took part in the illegal act itself.
Here, Anaya never saw or touched drugs. He had no hand in planning any drug smuggling operations. He was never told what was going on, and had no legal duty to ask. That is not willful blindness.
I think a better analogy is the store clerk who sells rolling papers and blunt wrappers to the same people who never buy tobacco. Would you say that a store clerk under those facts is also guilty of a crime?
Read a bit more (more than just Wired's ridiculously editorialized article that's written to make you want to love this guy). It's pretty clear to me that he knew full well what his traps were being used for, and even specifically used code words about trap capacity to avoid mentioning drugs.
Seeing the crime being committed or participating in it directly is not necessary for a conspiracy charge. He knowingly helped people smuggle drugs. I think that's a perfectly valid charge.
I think our drug laws are pretty messed up overall, and 24 years is a ridiculously unfair sentence for this sort of thing, but I think the evidence gathered by the prosecution very adequately painted Anaya as a co-conspirator.
> He was prosecuted in a state he'd never set foot in
He was prosecuted for criminal conspiracy in an interstate crime. One end of that crime was Kansas. His physical location when he engaged in the conspiracy is immaterial.
> for doing something that wasn't against the law
criminal conspiracy is against the law. You can take almost any "legal" activity and make the doing of it an element of a crime. For example, saying "Yes" is not explicitly illegal. However, saying "yes" in answer to the question "Would you kill this guy for ten thousand dollars?" would be an element of the crime.
> as contracted by people whose plans he did not know
Except for the fact that he was selling them secret compartments, witnessed one stuffed full of almost a million dollars in cash, and continued doing business with them. Plus, "avoiding talk of illegality" indicates that he knew what service he was really providing.
> and he was convicted, and sentenced to twice the term of the actual lawbreakers
He engaged in a criminal conspiracy, so he was also an actual lawbreaker. His sentence was very harsh though, agreed, but he was knowingly engaging in a commercial enterprise that assisted criminals for a number of years.
> That's not how the rule of law works.
Yeah, actually it is. A judge and jury in this case looked at the overall pattern of facts and correctly determined that this guy was aiding people in breaking the law. That's how the law works.
Its unfortunate that a guy who clearly had developed some interesting skills and otherwise had a kind of messed-up life ended up where he got. But this is not the fault of the criminal justice system, or prosecutors gone wild. This is a guy who made some really stupid choices and got caught.
So is a flight instructor responsible if the guy he is training is most likely intending to buy a Cessna and smuggle cocaine in from Mexico?
Even if I agree with you that he is guilty of conspiracy, the sentence is bananas. Someone I went to high school literally killed 2 people and got a shorter prison sentence than this. If this is the law working, something is completely wrong. I can't fathom how any non-violent, effectively victimless offense, can warrant 2 decades in prison.
If he advertises his services as "Learn to fly over the border in just 3 quick training sessions" and then continues teaching somebody after seeing them plotting courses around border patrol on a map, yes.
If the flight instructor has specific knowledge that that's what the guy is going to do, then yes, I'd say the flight instructor is partly responsible.
But I agree that the sentence is completely insane, as our most of our drug-related laws.
Think about it another way, though. Take the flight instructor analogy, and say the guy he's teaching to fly is going to buy a Cessna, pack a bunch of C4 into it, and crash it into a hospital. If the instructor has knowledge of this, is he not partially responsible if the guy follows through?
I agree that the sentence is way too harsh. He's clearly being used as a warning to the rest of the hidden compartment makers. Also, this guy must have had particularly awful representation.
I guess I just don't think that disagreement with the sentence requires disagreement with the findings of fact or with his conviction.
The main reason I'm responding to a lot of comments is not to defend the drug war, but rather to combat an incorrect "slippery slope" argument that regularly comes up in HN discussions like this. Something like, "Person X was convicted of crime Y because of facts A, B, C, D, E and F." and then there's a number of comments that boil down to "They're saying that B is illegal! What's next?!?! I do B all the time! The government is out of control!"
> Except for the fact that he was selling them secret compartments, witnessed one stuffed full of almost a million dollars in cash, and continued doing business with them.
Is having large amounts of cash illegal now? I still don't see where this guy actually broke the law.
"These dudes who don't have particularly noteworthy legal careers have a lot of money and are acting really weird about secret compartments in their cars" almost certainly falls under the reasonable-man test here, though.
I disagree. I think he was trying to be too clever.
The law in California, according to what I read here, is simple: building these things for use in drug activity is against the law. The reasonable man test is essential to the integrity of our legal system. And if you have a couple street thugs with $800k stuffed in their hidden compartment, a reasonable man would know exactly what they were up to. But they offered him more business. He gambled, and he lost.
Though I do find the sentence far too harsh. Give the guy 5 years.
No, if I see $800k stuffed in a secret compartment, becoming suspicious is reasonable. His actions after that moment are the key thing that make his role conspiratorial rather than just negligent.
After seeing how civil forfeiture works(i.e. cops using seizure of property ,for their own literal slush fund), I would not be so sure it must be FOR TEH DRAUGZ.
There is a joke among DAs "any one get a conviction for the guilty, but its takes a great lawyer to convict the innocent".
Its mind boggling how convictions are used as stepping stones for personal ambition and the Prosecutors are getting more ambitious when throwing the kitchen-sink at some of the cases and of course more often than not Judge and the Prosecutor on same party and the defendants are in a up-hill battle.
> You modify a car for better speed and handling. Later it gets used to rob a bank. You go to jail.
People modify cars for speed all the time. Most of them hoon around tracks or country roads, which isn't a crime - or, at least, is nothing more than a traffic ticket.
> You download Tor for a friend of a friend. They use it sell drugs online. You go to jail.
People use software to protect their anonymity all the time. Some just don't like the government, others don't like to respect copyright. Not a criminal matter either way.
> You sell someone a special hunting rifle (out of season). They use it for poaching. You go to jail.
People collect guns all the time. Most of them shoot at paper or clay pigeons or hoon around on the firing range, which isn't illegal.
These scenarios compare pretty poorly to what we've heard the person in this case did: he, for years, aided drug trafficking. In the first paragraph he admits to knowing this - when someone pays you money to install an ultra-secret compartment in your vehicle, and when you pull out nearly a million dollars in cash while trying to fix it, you damn well know what's up.
If I tune your car up, my expectation isn't that you're robbing a bank. On the other hand, if you bring it for repairs and I discover the problem is twenty bags of sequential bills in the trunk throwing off the suspension, my expectation is going to change pretty quickly.
The law isn't a magical thing that you can circumvent with the right incantations, nor should it be. It's better to have this flexibility, not worse.
ED: This is a controversial comment, which surprises me a bit. Let me add I'm not much of a fan of the war on drugs. But my central thesis is that allowing the legal system to apply a dose of common sense prevents such things as mandatory minimums and blind sentencing, which is a good thing all around.
Wait, it's "common sense" to you that we should be sentencing non-violent offenders to 20 years in federal prison? How does that make sense?
What is the cost to tax payers of putting him in prison for 20 years? What did he cost tax payers in helping the drug traffickers move their drugs a tiny bit more effectively? I can not imagine that this nets out positively for society, and it effectively ends this guys productive life.
These are not equivalent scenarios. They are all one-shot deals and, significantly, there isn't an obvious connection between the sale and the law-breaking. They could probably be altered to match a little more. Here's my take on the third:
You sell special hunting rifles that are designed to kill elephants. Sometimes people need them for self defense, you say when people ask. You insist that purchasers not mention that they will use them to hunt protected species, especially elephants. One of your clients asks you to come out to the field to repair his gun. While there, you see a stack of elephant tusks in the back of his truck. You tell him to get them out of there. Then you sell him and his friends more guns over the next year. They are caught and convicted of poaching, and then you are too.
> ...he will likely spend the next two decades in prison for doing something that isn’t specifically forbidden by federal law.
He was prosecuted in a state he'd never set foot in, for doing something that wasn't against the law as contracted by people whose plans he did not know; and he was convicted, and sentenced to twice the term of the actual lawbreakers. That's not how the rule of law works.