A number of years ago, this “barefoot bandit” dude did some rather bad stuff, which included stealing at least 3 small-ish airplanes and crashing at least one of them rather badly. Apparently, his activities were followed avidly on social media (one might suggest that he had “fans”). Eventually, he was captured, convicted, put in prison and ordered to make restitution for the damage he did.
Is this OK? Is restitution a component of the bandit’s sentence, or does the source of the money not matter? Is this a case of a criminal directly “profiting” from his misdeeds? I have a nagging feeling that this just somehow seems like and end-around that defeats the purported purpose of the justice system.
You’re right in that it has a bad feel… But so long as the money goes to the victims, not to him, it would seem to pass the legal test. He isn’t profiting.
Imagine that he’d inherited that money. Would that be a problem? Or that his very wealthy (imaginary) girlfriend paid it off for him. Would that be a problem?
If there’s a problem, it’s that our judicial system incorporates flat financial penalties, meaning that people with more wealth are insulated from punishment. It’s much more of a concern to me when a multimillionaire can pay off an expensive fine than it is when a dude like this avoids having his post-prison financial life ruined.
If he’d murdered his parents, who would he be paying restitution to? If he were paying it to his parents’ estates’ debtors, that’d be fine by me.
I’m not at all a big fan of flat financial penalties as part of the penal system. It disproportionately hits poor people. Either make the financial penalty a flat part of the person’s wealth (possibly minus a certain amount for owning a modest home), or make the penalty something besides financial (e.g., prison). To the extent that there’s a problem with penalizing people by hitting their finances, it’s not that this particular guy without money has found a way not to be hit hard by the penalty; it’s that the penalty exists at all.
In a real way, he does profit from this: if he had had to make restitution on his own, the net cost to himself would be much greater, because he would have had to borrow money or otherwise finance the restitution, meaning the interest would at least triple his personal outlay.
And yes, people like the Keatings, the Milkens, the Lays, etc, who create huge inexcusable scams that bilk millions of people should be set up to be totally ruined by their misdeeds.
Well, you’d have to identify the legal test. I don’t know of any federal Son of Sam law that would prevent a thief from selling his story. I stand ready to be corrected.
The overall benefit is that the victims of the crime get their restitution fairly quickly and easily if 20th Century Fox pays it on his behalf for the rights to the story. The victims wouldn’t actually receive most or even any of it if they are waiting for a convicted felon to get out of prison and earn enough money to ever pay them the more than 1 million dollars in judgment. That wouldn’t happen unless he hits the lottery after he gets out.
The part that you are missing is that the restitution isn’t really a punishment at all. It is money owed to real people because of damage he caused. If somebody took an ax to your expensive belongings, would you care who the check to fix the situation came from even if the liable person was also serving time in prison as punishment for it?
If he’s sold a different asset belonging to him, would there be any problem?
This is not really any different from the estate of OJ Simpson’s victims seizing the intellectual property rights to the book that Simpson wrote about the crime by way of enforcing the civil judgment they obtained against him.
In this case, the offender acquired a potentially valuable item of intellectual property through his participation in the crimes - namely, the IP rights to his own story. Since he shouldn’t profit from his crime, it seems right that the value of the IP rights should go to his victims rather than to him. Which is what is happening.
It’s no different than if he stole an asset, then sold it to pay the restitution.
I don’t have a problem with that, or with this, but I recognise that paying the restitution out of the proceeds of crime is not exactly the same as paying the restitution by being rich.
We do have a practice in this country that goes something like, if you have ten million dollars from selling cocaine, it gets frozen, so that you cannot use it to buy a high-end lawyer, and if you are convicted, that money is forfeit. It seems to me this particular guy’s story is the same kind of illegally obtained asset.
How does it punish the guy if he still “has” to pay restitution when he will never realistically earn enough money to pay it off? Some of the posters here seem to believe we should punish this guy just for the sake of punishment. Worse, since the victims will never be repaid, we are essentially punishing the victims as well just for the sake of punishing the criminal.
That isn’t productive. It’s a stupid idea, and the people who came up with it should realize what they have suggested is clearly stupid with no saving throw.
As long as he’s on the hook for restitution, he’ll have to fork over something as long as he has any income or assets at all. This deal relieves him of that burden, and thus provides him with a pretty clear financial benefit.
I acknowledge that. I’m saying that to the victims, him paying $50 a month on a minimum wage salary as a gas station attendant or something (he does have a criminal record, after all) is basically peanuts.
That’s an interesting parallel, but not quite accurate. This money is not merely the fruit of an illegal endeavor. It is the fruit of an endeavor that happens to be interesting.
There wouldn’t BE restitution — a civil judgment at worst — over a person’s health or life, IIRC, because we’ve already decided that no amount of money is gonna pay that back.
Actually, restitution can be ordered paid to a homicide victim’s family or to the victim of a disabling battery, etc., to compensate for lost earnings.
If Fox paid for flying lessons for the guy, maybe they could save some money next time they bail him out – I imagine crashing 3 planes is pretty pricey.