zlacker

>>tafda+(OP)
It's funny how if you are a major corporation with fat government contracts you can systematically destroy your engineering department, ostracize whistleblowers, and wind up killing hundreds of people and nobody gets punished and the FAA will even be on your side, like the Boeing thing.

but if you make a youtube stunt that hurts nobody you can get 20 years in prison and the FAA acts like you besmirched the stellar reputation of the aviation industry.

>>fatnec+Gt1
Both should suffer serious consequences IMO. Boeing more so.

>>jjalle+rx1
Yes, but 20 years for this dude is a bit excessive, no? Especially when nobody was killed or injured?

>>akudha+Wy1
He didn't get 20 years, that's just the maximum permitted penalty for the crime he committed. The article title cites it as clickbait.

It's rather irritating. The law was made with a flexible range of punishments to permit the judge of any particular case to use discretion when determining an appropriate punishment. The maximum permitted is thus rather high. So now every article written about the subject lazily cites "up to 20 years", and thus everyone reading those articles gets the impression that he's actually likely to get 20 years for this incident.

>>ufmace+HE1
Yes it is better to say "he can be sentence to no more than 20 years if found guilty". The 20 years is just a limitation on the court's discretion: hindering a federal investigation is never so bad that a person should be sentenced to life in prison or death or a 32 year term. But it might bad enough that 16 weeks or 30 months or 19 years is appropriate depending on specific facts.

And when the court does sentence a person for a certain offense, it should compare the specific facts of the case to the worst possible case, the one that would warrant 20 years, and if this is somewhat less than the worst possible case, then to sentence them to an appropriately shorter term.