Kristen Gyles | Saved by a guilty plea

Here’s an interesting story. In 2017, three young men founded a cryptocurrency company called Centra Tech. At the core of what this company was purportedly offering the world was a new cryptocurrency token called the Centra token (or CTR token) which, like Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies, was expected to grow exponentially in value.

Linked to the CTR token was the Centra Card which the founders marketed as having the functionality of a debit card that holders of cryptocurrency could use to spend their crypto in the real world, in real time. Sounds promising? Well, promises, false representations and flat-out lies turned out to be the primary tool used by the three business partners to lure in thousands of clients who wanted to cash in on the cryptocurrency boom at the time.

Over the time that these young men built a massive customer base, they piled lies on top of lies to make their phony business model appear credible. For one, they marketed themselves as having a CEO by the name of Michael Edwards, who had an MBA from Harvard and over 20 years of experience across highly reputable US banks. No such individual existed. They also lied about having partnerships with Visa and MasterCard that would enable the Centra Card to work in the way they described. And, of course, they marketed themselves as being licensed in several states in which they had no licence.

A MARVEL

To cut a long story short, they eventually got busted. But how justice was served is really a marvel. One of the three men entered into a cooperation agreement with the prosecutors. He became a cooperating witness against his co-defendants. By providing as much information as he could about how the business was created, how the three kept the business going for as long as they did, and how they generated as much funds as they did, the ‘snitch’ hoped to get a reduced sentence.

He gave the FBI enough evidence to put one of his co-founders behind bars for eight years. The other got one year. Eventually, the time came for his own sentencing. The Netflix documentary Bitconned quotes the judge as saying:

“I am very much influenced by the government’s report of your cooperation. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard the word ‘extraordinary’ used in connection with cooperation, and now I’ve heard it multiple times, at every stage of the case – from the investigation to sentencing of your co-defendants ... It is the judgment of the court that you are sentenced to a term of imprisonment of TIME SERVED.”

The informant walked free, despite initially facing a combined statutory maximum sentence of more than 100 years in federal prison.

It is hard not to wonder whether the justice system does itself any justice when it takes this approach to sentencing. What message do you send to potential criminals when you reduce the sentence of someone found guilty of a heinous crime from several decades behind bars all the way down to nothing, simply because they cooperated with investigators? Is the intention to deter people from committing crimes or to encourage them to commit crimes and then turn on their co-conspirators?

Although Centra Tech was a US-based company, this is not solely a US practice. It is certainly not unusual in Jamaica for a criminal to get a reduced sentence if he or she pleads guilty. In 2022, many Jamaicans got enraged when it was revealed that Rushane Barnett, who had slaughtered his cousin and her four children in Chapelton, Clarendon, would end up evading the death penalty, in part because he pleaded guilty. Barnett was instead sentenced to 61 years and eight months in prison. There are numerous other cases in which Jamaican criminals have been saved by a guilty plea.

EMBEDDED IN LAW

If you are wondering about the legal basis for this practice, the Criminal Justice (Administration) (Amendment) Act actually states that where a defendant pleads guilty to an offence with which he has been charged, the court may reduce the sentence it would have imposed on the defendant. The extent of the reduction is dependent on the point at which the defendant pleads guilty, but can range from 15 to 50 per cent.

It is good when criminals repent of their actions and confess. But confession doesn’t always mean repentance. When the legal system pries a confession out of a criminal by dangling a reduced sentence before them, the confession that comes after can in no wise be seen as a symbol of any type of contrition or remorse. Furthermore, even if it were, most would agree that remorse does not absolve a criminal of the consequences of past crimes.

One wonders if some of these cooperative confessions can even be seen as genuine. After all, if one sees himself as being bound to be found guilty anyway, he might just confess in hopes of a reduced sentence – even for a crime he did not commit.

It is well understood that the justice system runs much more efficiently when criminals confess. It is also understood that confessions ultimately result in a conservation of public resources. However, the justice system should not be seen as a negotiation table for criminals. How much consideration do we give to the fact that reduced sentencing, when used, overused and abused by the justice system, may actually be contributing to the very crime problem we say we are trying to solve? That aside, if we are willing to put one criminal behind bars at the cost of letting another criminal walk free, was it ever truly about justice?

Kristen Gyles is a free-thinking public affairs opinionator. Send feedback to kristengyles@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com