We've seen it over and over again how the justice system for the wealthy works.

But I really hope she gets those two years (minimum) in prison.

And Smollett.

No poor man gets a 6 month long trial.

If OJ was poor the trial would have been 3 days and with no money to challenge the prosecution on pretty much every detail, the prosecutions case would have sailed through.

The case the prosecution put on, as flawed as it was, works in 99% of all cases. It just doesn't work when the defendent can pay 10,000 hours of top flight lawyers at $500 an hour.

then.

without his wealth and celebrity.

And all the prosecution and investigative team mistakes would have gone un-called out during the 3 day trial.

liable. I have no idea if he ever paid a dime of it.

w/ Association Fallacy jammed in there for good measure.

Petulant-eye-roll-for-melodramatic-effect indeed!

The problem is that Cosby ostensibly committed multiple sexual offenses over decades and escaped legal consequences for a long time. Madoff also stole billions of dollars and appeared to be able to operate with impunity until he began to steal from other wealthy people. Finally Manafort worked as a foreign agent since the 1980's and represented the worst people on earth and walked among the most powerful people in Washington before Mueller went after him.

People compare that to the young man who gets caught with a dime bag of cannabis who gets a public defender, pleads out, gets a year in prison and basically can't get a job and falls into more criminal activity because of the damage that a conviction does to his ability to work and function in society.

Are you saying that there is no bias toward wealth in the justice system?

Then they will all walk. Pretty much everyone who participated in this scam are wealthy.

it's going to take more than 22 minutes to resolve, or even 30 with commercials.

...a fraction of time in prison. By rejecting a pleas deal and not pleading guilty she faces up to 20 years. But she didn’t just do it with one kid - she did it twice. And she will likely be found guilty (read the indictment- wow!). And be in prison for maybe as much as 5 years.

Bad decision. But she is arrogant and entitled. I hope they throw the book at her.

That takes time of course.

In the short term, that leads to only one option. Plead not guilty. That throws the ball back into the prosecutions court.

To plead guilty while negotiating a better deal wouldn't make any sense and be worse than a rookie mistake for an attorney (and I doubt she hired rookies)

or they are selling her some baloney.

They have documentation of her involvement.
they will have the testimony of the guy who set it all up.
They will have confirmation of how the process worked from some of the people who pleaded guilty.

What more does she think they will need?

But if her lawyers are trying to cut her a deal, the only correct action when asked for a plea is to plead "not guilty".

She can always change her plea later. But if she pleads guilty right away, deal making stops and sentencing begins.;

My guess is that she has enough money to hire a pretty good lawyer.

In my experience on both sides, deals don't tend to get better with age. The more you make the government work, the worse the deal often is.

So yeah, she can still plead guilty, but odds are the deal she ultimately gets will be worse than the one she would have gotten if she'd pleaded earlier in the process.

Having said that, again, could also be a client control issue where her attorneys cannot convince her to take a deal yet.

She showed some doubt after the first daughter's test manipulation, choosing not to do it for the second daughter. And it is obvious that she is both shaken by and remorseful about what she did. My guess for her and the others that have pled 2-4 months in jail, with either supervised probation after or a longer unsupervised probation. Martha Stewart got around 6 months for a more serious crime. Because Huffman is showing true remorse and showed doubt about what she was doing when it was happening, I would be ok with her just getting a stiff fine and probation for several years.

Do you think USC employees are going to testify in court? Why would they do that? Being in violation with NCAA rules is different that committing a crime, the owners of USC would be stupid to let employees testify under oath.

USC is a private university, even though they take federal funds the fact is that lori/mossimo cheated to get their kid in is not necessarily a crime, it's just cheating.

with the central mastermind of the whole operation.

Sure, the prosecutors can put anyone on the stand, but will they cooperate?

When the prosecutors added those felony charges (like mail fraud) to the people charged, it make me think that they want everyone to settle because they know it's going to be hard to make a prima facia case. It seems like a desperation move, and maybe lori's lawyer sees that as well.

That's all I'm saying.

A condition of his plea deal is cooperation along with other witnesses who have plead guilty such as the water polo coach that gave her the sports angle to get into school.

I'm sure she has a very good lawyer who will spin things as positively as they can under cross examination but she is the big fish from a publicity standpoint and the Feds will either want prison time and a complete mea culpa or a conviction in court.

He got hit for corruption charges where they had him on a wire and his chief political operative had given up the goods on him.

Rather than take a plea and be out in 5 years he rolled the dice and will be serving at least 15. He kept demanding in his negotiations no prison time which the Feds would not accept.

Of Huffman and Loughlin, Huffman seems to be sincerely remorseful and even torn up inside about what she did. PLUS, Huffman CHOSE to not use the scheme for a second daughter, which seems to imply that a moral light went off in her over what she was doing. Loughlin has been defiant the whole way.

My guess. Huffman gets a stiff monetary fine but a relative slap on the wrist as far as jail time goes. I think that prosecutors are going to want to make an example of Loughlin.

Their conviction rate is insane and they literally have infinite resources to prosecute.

Not that I do anything that would remotely get the Feds attention.

They figure they're too wealthy to serve any time for this.

I haven't been following the cases closely, but mostly the charges were on "fraud" basis. Depending upon EXACTLY what she did, that may be hard to prove. If someone else committed an act of fraud on her behalf, that'll have to be demonstrated. She has an attorney. I presume she's getting something close to "competent" advice. As someone else has pointed out, at the very least they may believe that in her case they can get a much better deal depending upon exactly what she did.

but if they have the evidence on her, soon she'll be spending tons of good money just to end up with a very similar sentence to what she'd received if she pleaded guilty early on.

I'd do what she's doing now, try to get a sense of how bad - or not bad - the case is and then probably plead at some point. She's almost certainly looking at time in a federal prison camp if the allegations are true and 2 years always sounds much better than 15 - 20. White collar federal sentencing guidelines are much stricter these days, and there is no parole.

It's an open and shut case and she can't flip on anyone else because they all pled guilty.

I don't know why it bugs me, but it does.