zlacker

>>tafda+(OP)
This is a plea deal, no one is going to plea to the maximum, which in this case is 20 years. The punishment can also be a fine [1], which may be fitting if the goal was profit from a YouTube video.

When news articles mention the maximum, especially in headlines, it feels a bit misleading. It seems there's a decent chance there is little or no prison.

[1]https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1519

>>pigbea+77
But that's what "up to" means. Almost every indictment is reported as "up to X" with X being the maximum. But it's almost never the maximum.

>>ehsank+d8
Technically correct isn't actually the best kind of correct. "Local Man Shorts One Share of IBM, Faces Up To One Billion Dollars of Loss" is technically correct, in the sense that there's no real upper bound, but it's not useful, and it's actively misleading.

A reasonable estimate based on sentencing guidelines isn't super hard for a lawyer to work out, and it'd be far more useful for readers, but it's slightly more work and it makes for significantly less exciting headlines.

>>Cobras+2a
> A reasonable estimate based on sentencing guidelines isn't super hard for a lawyer to work out

I'm not sure what priors the lawyer would use to guess the expected penalty for something as unprecedented as "Crashed a plane on purpose for YouTube likes."

Perhaps the maximum sentence is preferable for the news outlet because it's a number that's definitely not wrong?