Real estate tycoon Truong My Lan was sentenced to death by a court in Ho Chi Minh City in the country’s largest financial fraud case ever, state media Vietnam Net said.
  • Howdy@lemmy.zip
    4·
    3 months ago

    Meanwhile in the usa… Our very own real estate fraudster with 91 felony charges is the pick of 50% of the country to be president.

    That was bizarre to type. I can’t believe this is reality.

    • Ghostface@lemmy.worldEnglish
      01·
      3 months ago

      Or the fact the other real estate fraudsters who admitted dont convict Trump of the crime we are also doing!

      I can’t say nothing will happen to them as I thought, nothing would happen to Trump and here we are.

      I also have a biy more respect for giving someone enough rope to hang themselves. If Trump would of been stopped before his presidency, due to all of the reason any previous candidate would of been disqualified. We wouldn’t be here either.

      • Agrivar@lemmy.world
        0·
        3 months ago

        Or the fact the other real estate fraudsters who admitted dont convict Trump of the crime we are also doing!

        I keep reading and rereading this “sentence” and I’ve come up empty. Can you clarify?

        • Ghostface@lemmy.worldEnglish
          01·
          3 months ago

          Sure! In summary the political process would of discarded Trump as a candidate before reaching office. For reference there was a politician who dropped from running because he had a weirdish yell played across the air.

          Then you have Trump in office, having never divested from his companies, from day one Trump was in violation of a crime. Now here is where the rope comes into play. Trump was playing the gambit of not bring charged while in office which allowed him to believe he could keep delaying the clock.

          Now due to his corruption, he has taken down the GOP, that party is slowly imploding, judges, politicians he has exposed the entire grossness of the system.

          So short rope, no insurrection maybe… Long rope and it leave a wider wake of destruction. RNC downfall, GOP splitting up…

  • Sludgehammer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    3 months ago

    The 67-year-old chair of the real estate company Van Thinh Phat was formally charged with fraud amounting to $12.5 billion — nearly 3% of the country’s 2022 GDP.

    Wow, when your fraud starts being measured in “percentage of GDP” you know you got too greedy.

    • dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net
      1·
      3 months ago

      In Vietnam? Not sure. The French seemed to have a lasting benefit from doing this to every landlord they could lay hands on in the late 1700s, though.

  • octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    I read the article and I know her fraud was extensive but - anyone else feel like the death penalty for fraud is a bit over the top?

    • Inui [comrade/them]@lemmy.ml
      01·
      3 months ago

      Assuming we’re okay with the death penalty at all, no. As the other user said, this isn’t just “fraud”. The reason I suspect you are feeling this way is because it is hard to directly see the impact of their actions as violence against people in the same way as a murderer. But with crimes like this, which are typically given a monetary fine if that in other countries, there are potentially millions of people harmed by their actions. Their health, finances, personal and social relationships, employment, etc all may be impacted by “white collar” crimes. It can easily be argued that they deserve worse punishment (under a punishment-centric system) than murderers because of the scale of their actions. People just don’t make that connection because they’re not literally pulling a trigger.

  • MrFunnyMoustache@lemmy.ml
    0·
    3 months ago

    I think people like her deserve to spend the rest of their lives in prison, but no crime, no matter how severe, deserves a death penalty.

    • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Nah, make the rich afraid again. We can talk red rose pacifism once the ultrawealthy are out of the picture.

    • underwire212@lemm.ee
      01·
      3 months ago

      I think there are certainly crimes that deserve the death penalty (think CP type crimes). Just get those people out of society tbh, but this is just my opinion.

      The only problem I have is with 100% certainly. You would have to be certain, or very very close to absolute certainty, that you have the right person who committed the crime.

      • MrFunnyMoustache@lemmy.ml
        0·
        3 months ago

        If the person goes to prison for the rest of their lives, it will keep society safe from them either way. The death penalty is not making society safer.

        • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
          01·
          3 months ago

          People in maximum security prisons can, and do, escape. Sometimes the commit more violent crimes once they escape. A malicious governor can, in most states, pardon any person they want, and there’s no legal recourse. (In my state, the governor does not have the legal power to pardon a person until they’ve served at least 6 (?) years, and have been recommended by the parole board.)

          On the other hand, people don’t get raised from the dead, no one gets resurrected, and there’s no reincarnation. Dead is dead, and is as safe to society as is possible.

          The death penalty is certainly over-used, and applied in cases where it’s not likely necessary, but I absolutely, 100% believe that people like e.g., Gary Ridgeway should be executed as quickly as is possible.

          • xthexder@l.sw0.com
            0·
            3 months ago

            The risk of me getting wrongfully convicted of something and getting a death sentence is higher than the chance of some dangerous murder escaping prison and hurting me.

            Unfortunately being absolutely 100% certain is not a luxury we have in the majority of cases. People are framed, new evidence comes up, things like lie detectors and blood splatter analysis turn out to be junk science. Life in prison can get overturned and corrected if mistakes were made, death can’t.

            • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
              02·
              3 months ago

              I think that you can make it much, much more difficult to get a wrongful conviction in a case that’s eligible for the death penalty though. I think that, for starters, all interactions with police should require video and audio, so that suspects can’t be coercively questioned for 16 hours without an attorney before signing a “confession”. I think any claimed evidence should have to have standards that were published, peer-reviewed, and repeatable before they could use it. And I think that crimes eligible for an imposed death penalty should have to take place over a period of time, rather than a single event. E.g., a robbery/murder shouldn’t get the death penalty, but (per an earlier comment I made) a serial child rapist should. I would even say that you should be absolutely required to have forensic evidence in order to get a death penalty conviction; I believe that most exonerations were for convictions that relied on witness testimony, official misconduct, and coerced confessions, usually combined with an overworked and ineffective defense attorney.

              I dunno; even the possibility of someone like Ed Kemper ever getting out–like if he ever tells the parole board that he thinks he’s finally safe–is terrifying.

          • MrFunnyMoustache@lemmy.ml
            0·
            3 months ago

            Point about escaping/pardon. I acknowledge that society is ever so slightly safer when exceptionally dangerous criminals are executed.

            About the risk of being pardoned by a malicious state, it’s true… But the other way could also be true that a malicious state can execute people who don’t deserve to be executed, like Snowden… Perhaps a compromise is to make particularly heinous crimes unpardonable? That would be a decent alternative to the death penalty, and it would be very difficult to repeal such a law.

            As for escaping prison, it’s already rare that someone escapes from it. The solution is making better high security prisons for the most violent and dangerous criminals. I think it’s definitely possible to make escaping so difficult and dangerous that it wouldn’t be a problem. Make a prison on an island or an old oil rig, implants to track the prisoner’s location (a fancier version of the anti-theft tags in clothing stores), random X-rays to check they don’t have anything hidden in their bodies. All of these are definitely better than executing someone, though personally I think that maximum security prison breaks are already so rare it wouldn’t be worth it.

            • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
              01·
              3 months ago

              Remember that people did escape from Alcatraz. And Devil’s Island, IIRC. Never underestimate the ingenuity of prisoners that really, really don’t want to be prisoners.

              I think that the death penalty should be used in extremely limited cases, cases where there’s not even a shadow of a doubt about guilt, and where the person has committed multiple heinous crimes spanning a period of time (say, >1 year). So a simple mass murderer wouldn’t be eligible, but a serial child rapist would be. You’d also need to have forensic evidence that at a minimum cleared the Daubert standard, and you’d have to exclude forensic evidence that relied on standards that hadn’t been published and peer-reviewed. So DNA and fingerprints would be in, but forensic bite impression analysis would be very definitely out.

              I think the evidentiary bar should be extremely high for death penalty cases. I think that it’s currently mostly applied to people that don’t have enough money to get better legal counsel.

              I would also say that convicted people should be able to request the death penalty rather than life without parole. I can’t speak for anyone else, but if I had the choice between decades in prison, or being summarily executed, I’d take execution.

            • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
              12·
              3 months ago

              That’s an interesting interpretation.

              Yes, I think that Roger Stone should be executed, so that if Trump is re-elected he can’t pardon him.