[HN Gopher] Ghosn's daring escape cost his extraction crew their...
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Ghosn's daring escape cost his extraction crew their freedom
 
Author : JumpCrisscross
Score  : 51 points
Date   : 2022-12-12 10:23 UTC (12 hours ago)
 
web link (www.bloomberg.com)
w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
 
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| I am a little bit out of the loop. A several years back Ghosn was
| a fairly respected business figure in both France and Japan,
| which is even more extraordinary for a non-japanese exec.
| 
| What happened from there, was there actual corruption or did he
| piss off the wrong people in Japanese business?
 
  | mitchbob wrote:
  | Here's a good overview: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-
  | paper/v44/n02/james-lasdun/fishing...
 
    | DoingIsLearning wrote:
    | This paints a very clear picture. Thanks.
 
  | cheriot wrote:
  | There's a whole Netflix doc on it
 
| constantcrying wrote:
| What were they thinking? Am I supposed to feel bad? They helped
| an alleged criminal to escape from his prosecution. Then they
| returned to a country which basically has no incentives not to
| extradite them to their ally. What were they expecting?
 
  | notch656a wrote:
  | I feel bad for them. They helped Ghosn escape an unfair justice
  | system.
 
    | klyrs wrote:
    | If you're trying to frame this as civil disobedience, the
    | path forward is jail time, to get your day in court to
    | protest some unfairness of the law. But these were lackeys of
    | an ultra-wealthy guy accused of securities fraud and
    | embezzlement. The deck is stacked in Ghosn's favor, and he
    | threw his henchfolk under the bus. He knows well enough to
    | stay out of reach of extradition: this was not just
    | foreseeable, it was forseen. They took money to knowingly
    | engage in conspiracy to a crime. Womp, womp.
 
      | notch656a wrote:
      | If someone can't have a fair judicial process the "path
      | forward" is for them to have "jail time"? Fuck that, I
      | praise Ghosn's actions.
 
    | curiousgal wrote:
    | Would you felt the same if someone helped Meng Wanzhou
    | escape? A Chinese citizen arrested in Canada for violating US
    | sanctions on Iran sounds very unfair to me.
 
    | byroot wrote:
    | Is France justice system unfair too? Because it seems like
    | he's not really eager to face it either.
 
  | BrentOzar wrote:
 
| VincentEvans wrote:
| "They betrayed us" - Michael Taylor on both Trump and Biden
| administrations for unwillingness to shield him and his son from
| extradition to Japan to face criminal system there for
| orchestrating, successfully executing, and profiting from an
| escape of wealthy criminal from Japan.
| 
| I am struggling to understand what part of that description is
| supposed to elicit my sympathy for the victims of the alleged
| betrayal? The way I see it - "they served public interest" is
| what I would have said.
| 
| Personally I'd like criminals, especially if they happen to be
| wealthy, to face justice just the same. And those who commit
| crime in an effort to help them avoid that fate in exchange for a
| share of that wealth - to face justice doubly so. Strange how Mr.
| Taylor doesn't see it the same way.
| 
| I'd be interested to hear him present his moral argument to
| understand how _he_ interprets this situation.
 
| akadruid1 wrote:
| https://archive.vn/VvzOE
 
| kylec wrote:
| Sounds like the Taylors need to hire another father-son team to
| smuggle them out of Japan too
 
| Tozen wrote:
| Based on the article, it appears that Ghosn wants to pay them
| additional money (3 million dollars at least) as compensation for
| their troubles over the last 2 years. Seems like they will be
| well compensated, totaling over 4 million dollars in payments,
| not to mention any TV appearance fees or book and movie deals.
 
  | jollyllama wrote:
  | In the USA, you're supposed to be banned from profiting from
  | any crimes you did ("Son of Sam law"). I wonder if that would
  | apply in this case, given that they were presumably convicted
  | outside of US jurisdiction.
 
    | gnicholas wrote:
    | Looks like some of these laws have been struck down (for
    | violating the freedom of speech clause of the First
    | Amendment). [1]
    | 
    | It seems that some of the enforcement mechanisms of
    | surviving/new laws revolve around notifying the families of
    | the victims when a convict receives a large sum of money,
    | from any source. The goal is to give the family a chance to
    | sue in civil court.
    | 
    | 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_Sam_law
 
    | xoa wrote:
    | > _you 're supposed to be banned from profiting from any
    | crimes you did ("Son of Sam law")_
    | 
    | Not sure where you got this from? AFAIK that's a purely state
    | level thing, and the first law that tried that in a broad way
    | was unanimously struck down by SCOTUS as an unconstitutional
    | violation of the 1A. And for good reason, when you step back
    | and remember that "crime" itself can be very broad. It wasn't
    | that long ago that homosexual acts could still be a felony in
    | the US. There is a strong public interest in certain
    | criminals sharing details of what they did with journalists
    | after the fact too. New much more limited laws have passed
    | that I think is still up, but the ones I can think of at
    | least are specifically about compensating victims. IIRC the
    | mechanism is to notify and then let them sue in civil court
    | for a longer window. I don't think any of that would apply to
    | purely government criminal action though for somebody who has
    | already served their sentence and paid any fines.
    | 
    | You might be confusing those laws with conditions attached to
    | federal plea bargains in certain kinds of serious cases
    | (national security stuff like terrorism). Since those are
    | individualized "voluntary agreements" [0] specific to a given
    | case they can include things the government couldn't do as
    | blanket laws or even necessarily win as penalties in court at
    | all, and I know there have been agreements that included
    | turning over any and all profits from publishing deals to the
    | US government. But those AFAIK are the exception, not the
    | rule. And they wouldn't have any applicability here either.
    | 
    | Also, there doesn't need to be any special law for victims
    | who have successfully sued in civil court and won a damages
    | award to then go after whatever assets the criminal has or
    | gets down the road to cover it. This might as a practical
    | matter "eliminate profits": if a family of a murder victim
    | won $10m, defendant could only pay $1m, and then the
    | defendant gets a $7m movie deal later, court may award all of
    | the defendant's interest to the family to help satisfy the
    | original judgement. But again, I don't think the Japanese
    | government has any such cause here.
    | 
    | ----
    | 
    | 0: scare quotes around voluntary agreements since there is a
    | lot of reasonable debate about overuse/abuse of plea bargains
    | by US prosecutors. But at least legally they're pretty wide
    | open for now.
 
    | pavon wrote:
    | I think this would go beyond Son of Sam laws to flat out
    | Criminal Asset Forfeiture. It is the difference between money
    | earned from a movie/book about your crime, and being paid to
    | perform a crime. I would expect most countries to to have
    | laws about the latter, and that the US would cooperate in
    | seizing the money.
 
    | pedalpete wrote:
    | IANAL but my impression is that there are fairly easy ways
    | around this law, and I doubt it would apply to crimes outside
    | of US jurisdiction.
 
| jasonhansel wrote:
| They helped someone escape house arrest in Japan. Then they
| returned to the US. The US and Japan are close allies with an
| extradition treaty.
| 
| What did they expect to happen?
| 
| With the situations reversed: if a Japanese citizen helped break
| an American out of house arrest before fleeing back to Japan, I
| would be shocked if America _didn 't_ pursue extradition.
 
  | LarsAlereon wrote:
  | From an ethical perspective, it matters that the Japanese
  | criminal system has a 100% conviction rate and even the judge
  | thinking the defendant is innocent won't result in an
  | acquittal.
 
    | chollida1 wrote:
    | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_system_of_Jap.
    | ...
    | 
    | Not really what most people would expect when you say 100%
    | 
    | > According to them, Japanese prosecutors will prosecute only
    | the very few cases in which they are most likely to be guilty
    | and not many others.[2][3][4] According to Ryo Ogiso, a
    | professor at Chuo University, prosecutors suspend prosecution
    | for 60% of cases they receive, and end prosecution for the
    | remaining 30% through a simplified judicial process. Only
    | about 8% of cases are actually prosecuted, and this low
    | prosecution rate is the reason for Japan's high conviction
    | rate.[3][5]
 
      | cbracken wrote:
      | Quoting from Wikipedia [1]:
      | 
      | The conviction rate is 99.3%. By only stating this high
      | conviction rate it is often misunderstood as too high--
      | however, this high conviction rate drops significantly when
      | accounting for the fact that Japanese prosecutors drop
      | roughly half the cases they are given. If measured in the
      | same way, the United States' conviction rate would be
      | 99.8%.
      | 
      | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate#Japan
 
      | [deleted]
 
    | timoth3y wrote:
    | For reference the US federal government has a 99% conviction
    | rate.
    | 
    | https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
    | tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-f...
 
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(page generated 2022-12-12 23:01 UTC)