Life as a felon

I'm a small guy. I'm six feet tall, and only 145 pounds. I'm not exactly hyper-masculine or anything either. I mean, here I am posting on a music message board on the internet. Will I survive?

cheer up, life afterwards as a felon will be more complicated, but there's a lot of felons in a variety of stations in life.

since you're logged out, mind if we ask what you did?

How much work can you do when you don't even know what you're being charged with yet?

Jdubz, I don't post here very much. I doubt anybody will miss me.

a colleague with some, er, interesting connections/family members once told me that, if/when you arrive in jail, the first thing to do - no matter what size you are - is find the hardest-looking bloke you can and chin him. you'll instantly be sent to solitary, but - er, apparently - you'll gain a reputation as a super-hard crazy nutjob and be left alone after that. this sounds, to me, like utter bollocks. but hey.

i hope it doesn't come to this: i sincerely do.

Others, who also claim to have friends who have been in prison, have said that it's really just a vacation. They separate the prisoners so that blue collar crimes aren't stuck with murderers, rapists, etc, so you are left all alone. Is this true?

I don't know what to think.

Did you really think I didn't consider that?

This morning the secretary calls me and says that the lawyer needs to set up an appointment with me.

Did I mention that I live two hours away from my lawyer? I hired one of the best in the region. He knows how far away I live and how difficult it is for me to meet him.

What else would it be at this point?

And as far as "freaking out" over details, there's this thing called federal sentencing guidelines. There's also these things that Justice Department puts out ocasionally which includes a bunch of statistics, such as what percentage of people charged with a particular crime have prison time. Using those two handy pieces of information there, I know there is somewhat of a chance that I will, after being prosecuted, have some prison time.

But sorry for wasting your fucking time since I actually have no idea what's going on!

christ, yes, i think so too. i merely pass it on, just so the original poster can make an informed decision based on all the options available to him. or something.

personally, i'd have thought that if you chinned some massive bloke and went to solitary, you'd walk straight back out and into the mother of all pummellings.

No it is not.

And no, I am not Calum. I have been accused of being a troll on here before, so believe that if you will, but I only post under this name or the occasional logged-out.

No, not drugs.

And lastly, I got through to my lawyer. I am going to court soon. So, this post wasn't simply me "freaking out" because I "don't know what's going on."

God fuck this.

Ned, some of us have JOBS!!!!

Yes.

I certainly hope my luck will be that good! If I'm in any ads, I'll make sure to share them with everyone. Maybe we can set it up on BitTorrent or OiNK or something.

Earl Krugel, 62, was killed in an assault Friday evening at the Federal Correctional Institution, said FBI agent Richard Murray.

Murray wouldn't release further details but said federal authorities had opened a homicide investigation.

Krugel's wife, Lola, said FBI investigators told her an inmate had struck her husband on the head from behind with a cement block.

"Earl never saw it happening," she said. "He was exercising."

He had been at the medium-security prison for three days, according to his sister Linda Krugel, also of Los Angeles.

Felons I have known:
#1 Diverted, no effect on his life whatsoever.
#2, Not diverted, felon but County Jail only + probation, still can't get a normal job.
#3 Did prison, ratted people out to shorten his sentence, got out and returned happily to his life of debauchery.

I recommend #1

Copyright infringement is a felony offense, but it also has a misdemeanor version. The powers-that-be are refusing to allow me that one though. So, soon I will learn what life as a felon is like.

It's looking like prison is pretty unlikely, but I will get some sort of house arrest or a half-way home.

but here's hoping prison is off the cards.

I always assumed the authorities only go after the worst abusers, not just pick some guy at random and bust him. Seems harsh.

-- grimly fiendish (simonmai...) (webmail), November 9th, 2005. (grimlord)

There used to be mandatory federal sentencing guidelines. It worked on a point system. If such and such occured, add 4 points, but for such and such subtract 3, etc, etc. It's like a game. The points you acquire then spell out certain guidelines for sentencing. For example, 14 points is 6-12 months of zone B. Zone B means the time may be hard or soft -- ie, prison, jail, house arrest, etc. The judge has to sentence between those guidelines, it's required by law.

The supreme court just recently decided that mandatory federal sentencing is unconstitional and struck it down. The guidelines are still there, but they are no longer mandatory -- now they are just a recommendation. However, since judges have been using them for sentences for years on end, they still mostly stick to them. Academic studies into the matter have shown that the vast, vast majority of federal cases are still sentenced within the guidelines.

My point in telling you all this is this -- the guidelines say what the guidelines say, and a judge is most likely going to stick within them. He may let me off easier, or he may be harder on me.

-- Super Cub (messag...) (webmail), November 9th, 2005. (Debito)

This is what people on ILX never fail to understand, no matter how many times I say it.

There is a correspondance between "abuse" and likelyhood-of-being-targetted. The correspondance is not 1:1 though.

Not everybody who is targetted is a big abuser.

There are many factors that may contribute to someone being targetted.

For whatever reason, people here refuse to accept this as fact. Most of the people who have responded to my posts claim:
(1) I am lying
(1b) and/or I am a troll
(2) I surely must be the head of the Russian mafia and I raise money for our operations in Chechnya by selling bootleg Tatu albums
(3) "I completely don't understand the difference between a civil case and a criminal case, but I will pretend that I know what I'm talking about anyway -- duh, just pay the fine to the RIAA and you're innocent! Don't you know how the legal system works!"

This is why it is infinitely torturous to talk about this. If I discuss it with "real" people, offline, there is a zero percent change of any of them having any idea what is going on. Talking about it online, there is a small chance, but for the most part people act like assholes (see Tracer Hand above) or morons or a combination of the both. Yet, this has been eating away at my life for almost two years now, and it's insanely difficult to not talk about it.

That's why I wanted to just write this thread anonymous and maybe learn a little about what it's going to be like to be a felon. But then I accidentally outed myself. I'm a fucking moron too.

One thing I will thank the government for is being sensitive to time constraints.

There's a point deduction for accepting the plea as well. If I weren't to accept the plea, that would take me out of zone B. That would mean mandatory prison time under the sentencing guidelines. I really don't want to give a judge any more reason to consider prison for me.

Thank you for the concern, but this is a hopeless battle, it really is. And I don't want to fight it. I knew I commited a crime, and my only choice is to accept responsibility for that. Everybody else who infringes copyright, including ILXers, knows they are committing a crime too, but they don't think it will ever matter.

Uh... He's signing t-shirts at horror conventions. I don't think he got off so lightly. ;-)

Mickey, I'm very sorry to hear of this. :-(

I realize it's a bit late for this now, but would it have been possible, right after you realized your mistake, to ask the moderators to delete the post with your username on it? Maybe a couple people would have seen it, but it wouldn't have been part of the thread.

Jdubz, I haven't contacted the EFF per se, but I did speak with Cory Doctorow (of boingboing.net and the EFF) relating to copyright infringement issues before and, er, without trying to be too disrespectful, I don't think he was very informed. I was very disappointed with my interactions with him.

I spent $10,000 to hire one of the more high-profile, competent lawyers in the region here. I don't think the EFF could do anything for me that he hasn't already.

RIAA this, RIAA that, blah, blah, blah.

What does the EFF have to say about FBI investigations and criminal charges? I don't see anything on their page. Even if they were interested in helping me somehow, there's nothing they could do a "regular" competent criminal lawyer can't. Like I said, this is a battle that isn't worth fighting. I commited a crime knowingly and my only option is to accept the consequences.

Here's some information on federal prosecutions involving copyright infringement:

http://www.cybercrime.gov/ipcases.htm

The only 2 cases I see that went to jury guilty verdict involled (1) a guy who sold hardware to pirate Direct TV, and (2) a guy who physically videotaped a movie and resold it. Both were in California and both of these are very different from file-sharing in that the evidence of intent is much more obvious and thus easier to prove. The state (technically the district) matters because a federal court in a different state might follow a different interpretation of the law than federal courts in other staes.

If you do not see specific precedent for file-sharing criminal jury verdicts (as opposed ot these more obviously hardware cases), you should really think about making the prosecution prove their case. (Even if you do plan to plead, you should probably not make public statements like the last sentence in your last post -- it doesn't help and it might hurt.)

Anyway, good luck to you.

Thanks for being one of the few people who is sympathetic to that rather than calling me a liar.

It's my senior year of college, and I want to go into a law school. I wonder how this matter will affect that. And assuming I do get in law school, and graduate, I wonder how this will affect my trying to practice law.

Does anyone know where one could find information on how many of these types of cases there are? The site linked above is good, but says it just represents a sample of the total number of cases.

There's a decent amount of law professor-supplied webpages online: law journal articles, personal webpages, etc. Almost all the information is gathered exclusively from the Justice Department press releases (which are organized best on cybercrime.gov).

Same goes for the newspaper reporting of these prosecutions. They are pathetically done, rarely involving any investigation whatsoever and being solely re-worded DOJ press releases. From reading the articles wrote about myself, I can say with authority that you cannot trust newspapers to accurately cover this at the moment.

what?

banned, not actually dead.

This RIP meme is really fucking lame, btw.

Hadn't he been banned for weeks?

yes.

what did he get banned for?

he called you a spic

sick shit on the vt shootings thread.

xpost ha

that is no ha

oops i was confusing pasty closet racists

http://i7.tinypic.com/2111hg4.jpg

now i will never forget

what did he get banned for?

iirc he made an offer to piss on the schef's face, at which point tombot offered to knock his teeth down his throat. yeah, it wuz classy stuff. on the vt shootings thread no less.

i've heard worse

I may be off base, but the combination of being part of a large FBI sting and the fact that he may be sent to a "halfway home" instead of prison suggests that the files he was sharing was illegal porn.

In which case lunging at the biggest guy in the block wouldn't be a smart thing to do on day one.

audio porn?

they don't send people who share "illegal porn" (which would have to be child porn) to halfway homes, they put them in prison.

In some states they do. My brother's in one.

ysi?

In any case, my assumption was wrong.

do they put illegal porn sharers in RIAA propaganda videos?

IF IT'S AUDIO PORN!

I mean, someone's got to get paid, amirite?!?! Huh? Huh?!?!

p.s. I'll be collecting my modestmickey soundalike certificate via email, thankyouverymuch.

I love how in that linked article one of the persons interviewed is McNulty. DID THEY USE A WIRE?

Where's the piss on comment btw?

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