Summary
Vietnam’s High People’s Court upheld the death sentence for real estate tycoon Truong My Lan, convicted of embezzlement and bribery in a record $12 billion fraud case.
Lan can avoid execution by returning $9 billion (three-quarters of the stolen funds), potentially reducing her sentence to life imprisonment.
Her crimes caused widespread economic harm, including a bank run and $24 billion in government intervention to stabilize the financial system.
Lan has admitted guilt but prosecutors deemed her actions unprecedentedly damaging. She retains limited legal recourse through retrial procedures.
I’m against the death penalty. I have many objections to it. though if the person at hand is a billionaire all but one of my objections disappear.
the one remaining is that I’d rather not have the government have the power to kill its citizens. so I’m willing to accept life sentences and forfeiture of all assets instead. mind that the crime I’m talking about here is being a billionaire.
These god-damn violent tankies. Vietnam should have just fined her a much smaller amount than the corrupt practices made them, like how the West handles corrupt oligarchs.
Seriously. If she was born in the West, she’d be on the cover of Forbes and taking photos next to celebs.
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Ban wealth hoarding.
Gonna need a really good “Go Fund Me”
I don’t support the death penalty, but I won’t be terribly sad if a criminal billionaire gets executed by their own government.
I fully support it for the rich and powerful just because prisons can’t reliably hold them. If they’re not put in the ground, they’ll worm their way out of consequences eventually.
Can I ask what’s the cutoff? How much money/how high of a position qualifies you for the electric chair?
Higher than you’ll ever have to worry about.
About tree-fiddy
Bring this shit to the US. Chop chop.
They defrauded 12 billion, only have to pay 9? Sounds like they just made 3 billion.
Return 3/4 of what was stolen to get execution downgraded to life imprisonment that’s not getting away with it.
That said, my general opposition to the death penalty does influence me here.
If these fucks face a realistic prospect of getting their heads chopped off? Sure, let 'em roll those dice.
I dont get it. If you kill them you get the money anyway, right?
If it’s hidden or off-shore, probably not.
Ah, good point.
Mamma, what did you bring me to save me from the gallows pole?
Zeppelin?
Lead Belly and likely someone before him too
We now have precedent y’all
The amount of people in here pushing for the death penalty when it’s used on people they dislike is sickening…
This is a penalty that needs to be abolished, not expanded or made exceptions for.
Yea, I’m against the death penalty too. This shit shouldn’t be legal. It should be illegal and brutal. Like the mob takes you to the square and threatens to lynch you unless you give away the billionaire persona. The cops turn a blind eye. Total societal shame. Collapse of moral and legal order. And then afterwards, we all feel bad about it and we legislate a ban on wealth hoarding so that our society never falls to those kinds of depths ever again.
Revolutions aren’t pillow fights.
True, but they’re demands of a better world. There’s a difference between killing in a revolution and a 60 year old communist government executing an embezzler instead of giving her life in prison
The state ending someone’s life for breaking its laws and then having people here who would normally condemn the use of capital punishment compare it to a revolution and call it justified just because the state in question claims to be socialist is just so uniquely Lemmy.
Pearl clutching liberals? Not once.
Nonsense. I oppose the death penalty for almost all crimes. It’s just too easy to render an inaccurate verdict, and you can’t undo an execution.
But we don’t have any doubt about billionaires. They’re verifiably guilty beyond any shadow of a doubt.
I also think they should be able to avoid the death penalty by giving up their wealth and living on minimum wage for a number of years equal to the number of billions they captured and withheld from society.
You’re completely right.
However, I feel like I’d make an exception for people who massively contribute to an actual existential threat to humanity. Ie billionaires. All billionaires.
I’m not saying we should kill them. I’m saying we should use the possibility of that being on the table to make them pay their taxes. The entire planet is ruined by billionaires when we could literally everyone have enough to have our basic needs met while having an economy and industry which isn’t on track to make the planet uninhabitable for us, seeing as it’s the only planet known to support life.
Yes, all life is important. That’s why all life should be protected by making sure the planet doesn’t become one huge airfryer. If while doing that a few billionaires get guillotined, I’m honestly fine with it. I’d prefer they’d just actually help people instead of being selfish assholes, but if them being selfish assholes is putting everyone else in danger, then the choice is clear, no matter your views on the death penalty. (Which as you say, shouldn’t be a thing.)
I dunno, reducing them to being not-billionaires and even not-millionaires would actually be a pretty just sentence IMO. I bet being reduced to a regular Joe would hurt some of them more than the death penalty
What’s to stop them doing it all over again, given some starter money? Usually what makes these assholes so effective is their lack of empathy. That works well in capitalism.
White collar crime needs to start getting hard time in the same prisons that proper criminals go to. That’d be a deterrent, or a motivator to fix the prison systems.
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Seems to be a common mindset among americans. As european I don’t understand it.
Why, though? The usual reasoning for abolishing the death penalty is the argument that we might make a mistake and mistakenly sentence innocent people to death. But what about crimes like this, where the crime is entirely on paper, fully documented, and with no risk that you’re prosecuting the wrong person?
Edit: I’m not sure why I’m getting downvoted with no replies. I’m asking an actual question here, if you disagree why not state your opinion?
I think it’s a valid question. I wouldn’t say that the only reason for abolishing the death penalty is because we might make a mistake… that definitely factors into it, but there’s more to it.
Ask yourself what purpose does it serve to put someone to death? They’re already in jail/prison and no longer a threat to society. Deterrence? Is the death penalty any more of a deterrence than a life sentence?
The only purpose I can think of for the death penalty is that it’s for “Revenge”. It doesn’t actually fix anything in of itself. It doesn’t resolve disputes, it doesn’t really solve anything.
Because we’ve always said that we won’t make any excuses for the terror when our turn comes.
Can you expand on this?
Either you replied to the wrong comment, or you’re clearly thinking of some context that I’m not, or it’s related to some saying that I’m not familiar with.
I want to point out that this is already the standard for conviction. The finder of fact must find the accused to be guilty beyond all reasonable doubt before convicting them. So from a legal perspective, everyone convicted of a crime already has been proven guilty to the highest possible standard. If there is any shred of doubt at all about the guilt of the accused, they’re supposed to be acquitted. It’s only possible in retrospect when new evidence emerges that exonerates the accused that it can be determined that the original guilty verdict was incorrect. You can’t really “force” this evidence to emerge with any amount of policy changes. It just happens over time.
For example, witnesses lie. Maybe five years after the fact they feel bad about lying and retract their testimony. Maybe some of the investigators assigned to the case just made up some evidence to get the accused convicted in court because they just thought there was no way he could be innocent and they just needed to cook up the evidence to get them declared guilty, and they can only admit that when the statute of limitation passes. Or maybe, three years later, a convenience store manager deleting old footage happens upon a CCTV tape giving the accused an alibi. Or maybe still, the accused was actually framed and their framers only got caught ten years later doing some other crime, and it turned out that they forged the accused’s signatures on those documents and used their computer to send those e-mails without their knowledge. I could go on.
So if your proposed standard is applied, it would not actually exclude anyone from execution because everyone who’s been convicted has already been proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt.
Well fuck billionaires but papers can and trials can be wrong.
Like who’s to say she wasn’t a patsy?
I’m not saying she was, but how would you prove beyond any doubt that she wasn’t?
Probably this case is an open-and-shut case but my point is valid, I think.
Full support dude.
But what about crimes like this, where the crime is entirely on paper, fully documented, and with no risk that you’re prosecuting the wrong person?
This point rests my case.
If only all “tycoons” could face execution…
Two things America loves: billionaires and the death sentence. It has just never thought to combine them in this way.
I don’t care for billionaires or the death sentence.
If we revised the system I could be okay with the death sentence in some situations but the way it is now makes absolutely no sense.
I am against the death penalty and would only give it consideration in the case of billionaires
I don’t trust the state to ever decide whether someone deserves to live or die.
Some vigilantes on the other hand…
Meh, I am more lax with life. I think it can easily be done more humane and much cheaper. Shit for a while there I remember reports that the drugs we used weren’t allowed to be used to euthanize pets because they were to inhumane. That said, I think anyone who gets a long sentencing should be allowed the choice. 15 years, or you chose to live 1 year in prison and then if you still agree a year later a mask with carbon monoxide would be fine for me.
We always worry we are killing innocent people, and innocent people will die this way as well, it at least was their choice though. If you do it in a decent way… Instead of it costing far more than life in prison does already right now, it could be beneficial to some people.
Then again I also think assisted suicide should be legal as well. Same sort of idea. Choice to check into a facility or live in normal life, with a set year of discussion with a therapist and at the end of that year if you still wish to be done, your done.
Or even just a sedative to knock you unconscious like at the oral surgeon, then put the mask on the person for 30 mins. They wouldn’t feel a thing and it would be cheap.
I’m 100% for assisted suicide. I don’t think anyone should have the say except the individual. I’d be happy with the plan you laid out, seems reasonable for everyone.
As far as using it as a penalty there are two reasons I’m against it:
- I want it to slowly eat at them that they were afforded a mercy that they didn’t afford others.
- I want to see to it that they live long enough to fully understand the pain and misery they caused
I honestly wish it was possible to exend a convict’s life as long as possible to see that they really do understand and finally feel the shame of their actions.
The purpose of prison ought to be reconciliation and rehabilitation, not revenge or forced contrition. Many prisoners do feel remorse for their crimes, but unfortunately recidivism is so high (in America) because our socioeconomic and judicial systems are tooled to undermine a parolee’s attempts to reintegrate into society, setting them up for failure.
Only in extreme circumstances, i.e. truly sociopathic criminals, should sentences that remove all hope of reintegration or release be issued. True sociopaths are incapable of feeling remorse, no matter how long or under whatever conditions they are kept. They do understand the weight and impact their crimes had on their victims, but they do not care. No amount of coercion will change that. In these fringe cases, I’d argue that giving them the choice between lifelong sequestration or self-inflicted suicide is ostensibly the best solution for everyone.
Sociopathic criminals aren’t to blame for how they are. They aren’t really in a position to change themselves nor have they decided to be this way.
Therefore the only punishment should be taking away their ability to harm others by limiting their freedom.
But if this is the sole punishment, I think hardly any would choose death. Why would they, if they could live a comfortable yet supervised and limited life? Key point is comfortable. That’s not what the vast majority of prisons are today which means allowing them to choose suicide is more or less a coerced death penalty if we’d just slap it onto the current system.
Nailed it
Common Vietnam w
All we gotta do is sentence a handful of billionaires to death and watch the behaviour change when they realize they’re not insulated from consequence anymore.
Hold them accountable for all the preventable deaths resulting from them screwing around with the economy. 2008 would have seen a ton of them going to prison for the rest of their life.
Imagine all the outrage from red state conservatives if we attempted this.
Oh who cares, they get outraged when a day ends in y.
There wouldn’t be any outrage outside of 100s of the wealthy donors. Liberals would completely be more outraged because of norms and civility. The entire point of “drain the swamp” was that most people hate oligarchs, the point of Republicans is to redirect this off into racist and unproductive channels, where nothing ever comes of this hate for corporate and wealthy overlords.
I’m okay with the outrage.
Or from blue state liberals because “we’re better than them” or some shit.
It’s not like any of us want life to be made so difficult when we’re billionaires either
Good point, good point.
Yeah but what they are going to do is make sure they get those protections back. They aren’t going to get better.
Then sentence more of them as necessary. Im all for sweeping changes but we’re not getting them. Convincing America to kill someone seems way more likely to me.
You didn’t hear it from me, but I heard that billionaire skipped the fare on the subway…
Shit, that’s peanuts. Every single billionaire worldwide wakes up every single day, and actively chooses to murder people. I’m not being hyperbolic.
In most, if not all, of the world billionaires can just murder whomever they can’t buy.
Clearly not Vietnam
This is the right way to deal with these ghouls.
