Does Caroline Ellison get >=1 years sentence?

At the reality level, my guess as to why is a somewhat-delayed the successful conviction of SBF: testifying against him was presumably part of whatever deal Caroline had with the government, and the fact that e.g. the jury did not seem impressed by SBF's defense or swayed by any arguments like 'Caroline did it all, I was unaware' is presumably good news for her. I don't know of any more recent news that would swing the market.

predicts NO

@AndrewHyer For me it was a former prosecutor on the last episode of Judging Sam saying that, in her view, the cooperating witnesses are unlikely to get any significant prison time—she’d be surprised if they got more than a year and one day. Because they fessed up and started cooperating almost immediately. Unlike Sam.

predicts NO

@NicoDelon I am not a lawyer and don't know if this is accurate, but I have heard that federal sentences <=12mo must be served entirely, while sentences >12mo are eligible for parole early (and so 366 days is de facto a shorter sentence than 364 days). This might make the 1-year market a little odd.

predicts NO

@AndrewHyer yeah, I think that's why the prosecutor said one year and one day, though (iirc) she said something about there no longer being official federal parole (apparently since 1987), so basically the judge has to account for that if they want to be lenient. I'm not a lawyer either and may be misremembering the episode.

predicts NO

The transcript is a little rough, but here's the excerpt, which I was not remembering too poorly:

As to Caroline Allison, Gary Wang, Nishad Singh, I'm very curious about this too. What do you think in any other case, with any other judge, I would have said, with almost one hundred percent confidence probation, the default SDNY sentence for a first time offending white collar defendant who's a cooperator is not to go to jail. And typically where you saw cooperators do jail time despite the fact that they were cooperating, was in cases where there's really serious violence. You know, someone who participates in a murder and is going to get a big reduction, but they're not going to get off scot free. I think that probably is still true here. These guys are are also like SBF, they're relatively young. There's no indication that they have any other wrongdoing in their past. And I think that is still probably right that the judge will say, look, on the one hand, this was very serious and you participated and knew. And on the other hand, these guys, these guys started cooperating really fast. They clearly owned up to it immediately. They didn't wait to see which way the wind was blowing. They really came in. And I think that's probably where it lands. And Kaplan's a hard, harsh sentencer, and is there a world where he says this was too serious and too big and you have to go to jail? I think it could happen. I still think it's unlikely. And if that happened, I would strongly suspect sentences of a year and a day, which is a weird sentence. But in the federal system, they abolished parole in the eighties and after that they have a system of fifteen percent for good time get credit for time off. You can only get fifteen percent time credit for sentences that are longer than a year. So a person who gets a year serves a full year. A person who that's a year and a day serves, you know, ten and a half months, and so you almost never see its ends of [?] exactly here.

predicts NO

And so that's why I'm not betting NO too heavily here, because of the 366 days thing. Kaplan could order probation and no actual jail time. Or a few months. Or the one year and a day thing. The 3+ and 4+ years markets are probably still overpriced though.