The judge will not in fact have to abide by the guidelines, which are advisory, and are especially advisory in sui generis trials like this where the damages and victim counts blow out the guideline charts.
Damages blowing out the charts just means a very high guidelines offense level, it doesn't make the guidelines any less applicable (and there's not really charts for victim numbers, there's a few categories for financial offenses, but mainly the guidelines expect beyond a few the aggregate loss factor to handle it, and by the time you blow the top off that chart, you've also very nearly (with just that factor and the base offense level) maxed out to a sentence of life or whatever the maximum is for the offenses on which you were convicted -- it only takes a few additional modifiers like having a substantial portion of the criminal conduct outside of the US to do that.
Way too many people here have read Popehat's (very important!) piece about how reporting of aggregate statutory maximum penalties is usually extremely misleading because in the vast majority of cases the guidelines ranges (1) will be applied, and (2) will be much shorter than the aggregate statutory maximum and are hypercorrecting into "SBF's actual sentence will be far below the aggregate statutory maximum because sentencing guidelines", without any idea of how the guidelines would apply to the facts at issue in the case.
It is sad there isn't some easy linear calculation like divide the amount defrauded by minimum wage and sentence is that number divided by 8 in days. It is always sad when people get discounts just because they stole lot of money compared to some that stole little...
By the federal guidelines, the base sentence for somebody who stole more than 10mm and defrauded more than 500 people is life.
There’s no discounts here.
What seems more likely to me is that life will end up excluded by a statutory maximum, and the judge will exceed the guideline dollar figure based on the degree to which SBF’s crimes exceed the guideline scale.
