re: #183 Killgore Trout

I keep seeing the claim of 105 years for posting a link. I’d be curious to know how much of that potential time was from the link of the death threats to the FBI agent.

This was linked to in the comments of that reddit submission Charles posted:

popehat.com

People reporting on federal criminal justice — whether journalists or bloggers — routinely report on the statutory maximum sentence that a defendant could hypothetically get, an oft-ridiculous figure calculated by taking all the charged crimes and adding up the maximum punishment for each. …

The problem is this number — the sum of the maximum sentence for all the crimes charged in a federal case — usually bears almost no relation to the sentence the defendant actually faces.

Responsibility is not a zero-sum game. The Department of Justice, and its constituent U.S. Attorney’s Offices, bear responsibility for repeating statutory maximums in their press releases bragging of indictments. Journalists and bloggers bear responsibility for repeating those numbers uncritically, especially if they repeat the “THAT’S MORE THAN YOU’D GET FOR DOUBLE-MURDER” meme.