>He then implanted the embryos in ewes on his ranch, resulting in a single, pure genetic male Marco Polo argali that he named “Montana Mountain King” or MMK.
Maximum sentences and actual sentences are typically very different. Popehat had an article titled “whale sushi” that unfortunately appears to be offline about this.
True, though Federal sentences have much less opportunity for things like early release based on good behavior, etc. You tend to serve most of the sentenced time.
Yes, but the point is the sentenced time for federal crimes tends to be much closer to the result of calculations under the federal sentencing guidelines than it is to the statutory maximum for the charged offenses.
I would guess all the factors that go into "how long will someone actually be incarcerated" are interesting and on topic. Why would just one be "the point"?
I meant “the point of the post you are responding to, which you seem to have missed”, when I said “the point”; I thought, in context, that would be clear.
You can see way at the bottom of the table that offense level 43 is life in prison even with no criminal history.
Even second degree murder is a base offense level 38, which is 19.5-24.4 years with no criminal history, or up to 30 years to life with criminal history.
> Your comment is factually incorrect. In no universe is anyone getting 10 years in federal court for killing a person.
If you mean “no one will get that much for any criminal homicide”, you are wrong.
But if instead you mean “no one will get that little for any criminal homicide”, you are also wrong, as involuntary manslaughter has a statutory maximum, forget even the guidelines ranges, of less than that.
> Federal law provides that someone convicted of involuntary manslaughter may face up to eight years in federal prison, but the base sentence for the crime under federal sentencing guidelines is a prison sentence of 10-16 months.
For the Lacey Act:
> For an individual, the criminal penalties are not more than 1 year in prison and a fine of $100,000 or twice the gross gain or loss. For a corporation the criminal penalties are not more than 5 years of probation and fine of $200,000 or twice the gross gain or loss. Restitution and forfeitures may also be imposed.
> If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years,
So, I don't understand where either you or OP are coming from. The intention is to paint the government as the irrational Bogeyman who's going to lock you up and throw away the keys when you 'lie about some animals', the same as when you kill a person. This is not correct, unless if you take the maximum for violating the Lacey Act and the minimum for manslaughter, basically using the extremes and calling it normal. Like some sort of 'Appeal to Extremes' fallacy.
So, to recap, OP said:
> You lied about the type of sheep you're bringing in? 5 years by 2 counts.
Wrong. It's 'no more than 5 years'. You really need to be on the far end of the spectrum to get the maximum sentence for something like this, which is usually punished by a fine + probation.
> Kill a guy, that's 10 years.
Wrong again, the minimum bar for killing a person is involuntary manslaughter which has a minimum of 10-month imprisonment (so there's no probation in the guidelines, it's a minimum imprisonment sentence) and a maximum of 8 years. If we're talking about murder in the first degree, then it's either life in prison or capital punishment.
And so the ceiling being 5 years per count here seems rational to you because it's in the guidelines, and "no one is actually going to get that". Which is exactly my point.
The rationale here seems to be that if we give a large enough entity enough leeway with the lives of its constituents, then anything less than the extremes of punishment is necessarily morally righteous because they were not the subject of the minimum or maximum punishment - punishment that the large-enough-entity was indeed capable of giving them because of that leeway - but kind enough instead to apply "the law" which necessitates punishment somewhere between the extremes.
Which is exactly the point of "guidelines" being super high in the first place - so that you can be a subject of anything in-between the floor and the worst imaginable, and people can turn around and feel just about it, because they are not its subject.
My point is no one should be seeing even a year in prison as their punishment for essentially smuggling sheep, it has nothing to do with federal sentencing guidelines, the argument is from a moral perspective - it biases the punishment upwards and then allows the court to assert any fine or damages below that amount but vastly above what it would be if the maximum was not five years per count.
I'm not going to defend a murderer who's already been convicted and sentenced, but if you do a little more digging for a site that's more reputable than the New York Post, you'll find that this guy 1) entered a plea deal; 2) supposedly killed his wife in a fit of passion due to her robbing him and having an affair; and 3) was interestingly sentenced by an all-woman jury who one would expect to be less forgiving when sentencing someone who killed his wife. Obviously we can both agree that he should be in prison for longer than 10 years, but alas, he was judged by a jury of his peers and that's what they decided justice looked like in this case.
But anyway, it's not like I wasn't saying people don't get sentenced to 10 years for murder, so don't act like you got me in some kind of internet gotcha. I wanted to know what nuance – i.e. plea deals, details of the crime – you had left out, because you were trying to conflate the sentencing of some guy trafficking wildlife with the sentencing of murderers, as if either of these things has any bearing on or relevance to the other.
Captive hunting facilities is such a gross term. I remember reading Field and Stream as a kid and they talked often about what was sporting vs. not. It taught me a lot. I don’t like killing things so I don’t partake at all but I don’t even recognize the sport as it is conducted now. Seems more like tactical warfare.
I was perplexed when a friend of mine decided to take up hunting for birds. I was dismayed when I discovered this "sporting activity" involved paying to have birds that are bred in captivity stashed in various locations around a wooded area, which he then startles out of hiding with his dog and then blasts with a shotgun. Surely one of the cruellest and stupidest pastimes ever invented.
He violated State, Federal, and International laws in pursuit of his enterprise. I gotta hand it to him it’s an impressive scheme to (almost) pull off at 80, I hope when I am that age I’ll be half as motivated to do stuff as he is.
And there are numerous reason why there are restrictions on transferring genetic material and how it’s used. Doing something wrong can greatly disrupt an ecosystem.
You not understanding why something is illegal doesn’t mean it should be legal.
> It should be illegal because it's against the law?
Don't be condescending. These laws are on the books for a reason. Multiple reasons actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species . Also, whenever a foreign pathogen decimates livestock in the US, remember the 'It should be illegal because it's against the law' statement.
Import of wildlife and organic material is very well defined in US Code. Even transport across state lines is well defined. This isn’t some obscure case precedent - it’s clearly illegal.
Yes, the sheep itself could easily be a pest, as has happened with Asian carp, zebra mussels, emerald ash borers, etc. It's not difficult to imagine a scenario where escaped giant sheep manage to outcompete local wildlife.
The title on the DOJ release is misleading. It's not the breeding that was the crime. Trafficking in endangered species and fraudulent veterinary documents I think were the actual crimes, which he committed in support of the breeding efforts.
I think the issue is buying parts of an endangered species. It’s problematic in the same way that buying a rino horn is illegal. He’s supporting a market that harms an endangered species.
The dude tried to create a new species which could potentially become invasive.
Look at what kudzu is doing to the South or invasive Asian carp are doing to midwest waterways to get a sense of why that is an absolutely batshit insane thing to do and why it should be massively illegal. Invasive species are like biological weapons of massive destruction. Their potential blast radius is damn near infinite.
This is very tangential, but I just learned today that aristocratic ancient Romans used to dye sheep purple. To show off to other Romans, they used the then super-expensive purple dyes, the ones they used on woolen togas of high social rank, on whole sheep. Pliny wrote about it in Naturalis Historia.
- "I myself have seen the fleece upon the living animal dyed purple, scarlet, and violet,—a pound and a half of dye being used for each,—just as though they had been produced by Nature in this form, to meet the demands of luxury."
> Schubarth and others forged veterinary inspection certificates, falsely claiming that the sheep were legally permitted species. On occasion, Schubarth sold MMK semen directly to sheep breeders in other states.
It's strange to have a felony for unlicensed imports of genetic material. The law the press release cites classifies that as "animal parts". Hypothetically—would it be the same crime if they sequenced the DNA of those sheep in Kyrgyzstan, transmitted the sequences electronically into the USA, and then synthesized the DNA from the digital sequence? Ignoring the question of whether that's currently feasible or not.
Would it be legal to synthesize* i.e. extinct mammoths from paleontological DNA samples? Would it make a difference which part of the globe the mammoth samples were found in?
Okay, don't love what he was creating the sheep for but I'm not sure I understand why this is such a big deal? We change animals all the time (looking at you, French Bulldog owners), unfortunately often to their detriment.
I know we're not supposed to ask if you've read the article, but I've gotta wonder why the first two top-level comments are responding to the headline and wondering why a whole bunch of shady and fraudulent behavior isn't okay. Did this denizens of this site learn nothing from Theranos?
> Schubarth brought parts of the largest sheep in the world, Marco Polo argali sheep (Ovis ammon polii), from Kyrgyzstan into the United States without declaring the importation
He didn’t import an invasive species, he imported PARTS.
I do not see any victims of his actions.
Also this is for a wild game ranch, for hunting. These ranches have extra high fences that surround the entire property to keep all the animals contained. Even if he did import the whole sheep, he has a strong economic incentive to contain them.
This exact thing is perfectly legal in Texas, happens all the time, and causes no problems.
To add to the other stuff, French Bulldogs probably won't reproduce in the wild and outcompete native species, but these sheep might (as the grey squirrels are doing in the British Isles).
> The Lacey Act prohibits interstate trade in wildlife that has been taken, possessed, transported or sold in violation of federal or state law. The Lacey Act also prohibits the interstate sale of wildlife that has been falsely labeled. The Act is one of the most powerful tools the United States has to combat wildlife trafficking and prevent ecological invasion by injurious wildlife.
“pleads to X charges” is a common idiom referring to entering a plea that accepts sentencing on the charges named (either guilty or nolo contendere/“no contest”—they function the same in the context of the charges, though the latter cannot be used in subsequent litigation the way the former can, and is typically ag the discretion of the court to allow for that reason.)
I'm not understanding why these are federal charges. I thought selectively breeding animals and crops for desirable features is common place. For example: pugs can't reproduce naturally because people selectively bred them. Small dogs also don't occur anywhere naturally, they're human engineered animals.
In the article it explains it - he's using a non-native (banned) species to breed, that's also endangered, and using material from wild game (also not allowed), and he's forged paperwork to cover it all up.
The charges have little to do with merely creating a hybrid. The release notes multiple violations of state, Federal, and international law, including document forgery and importing an endangered species.
Has anyone found pics of "Montana Mountain King"?