Keith Alan Raniere is 61 years previous right now. He is celebrating his birthday in solitary confinement at USP Tucson. This is his thirty sixth day in solitary which the Bureau of Prisons euphemistically name the SHU, which stands for particular housing unit.

And it’s particular. A prisoner confined there spends 23 hours per day alone in a cell roughly 10 x 8 [the size of a small bedroom] with a bathroom and sink contained in the cramped area. Raniere will get out for an hour per day for train. He is permitted to bathe a couple of times per week and will get a complete of half-hour of cellphone calls per 30 days.

Attorney calls, I’m informed, are made in handcuffs in order that he can not take notes.

This is Raniere’s third birthday in jail. The final two had been on the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center and final yr’s celebration was through the COVID protocols and he very possible was in lockdown, although not essentially in isolation.

Prior to those final three birthdays. Raniere’s celebrations had been extra elaborate. In reality, they took on the character of a 10-day gala, known as Vanguard Week. Vanguard is the title/title Raniere was generally referred to inside the NXIVM group and was meant as an acknowledgment of him because the chief of thought for the NXIVM group.

Vanguard Week was held on the YMCA resort in Silver Bay on the shores of Lake George within the Adirondack Mountains of New York. As many as 500 folks attended, most of them paying greater than $2,000 to participate within the retreat, which included an nearly unique commingling of NXIVM adherents with Raniere on the middle. Classes and performances, competitions, and late-night gatherings had been meant to help the solidarity and tradition of the group.

Some folks have quipped that whereas it’s known as Vanguard Week, the occasion lasted 10 days, which means that both there have been three days left over, or Raniere has had a brand new dispensation for the true size of per week.

Where Raniere will spend future birthdays is at this second unclear. It is unclear for a number of causes. He has been sentenced to a 120-year sentence predicated largely on his convictions of racketeering, intercourse trafficking, and compelled labor.  As it stands right now, the 61-year-old would, to finish his sentence, be obligated to serve an extra 99 years, presupposing he earned the required time reductions for good habits.

His launch date is June 27, 2120. He can be 159 years, 10 months and at some point previous ought to he survive.

If he had been to serve his sentence and emerge as what some arguably would possibly name a relatively aged man, he would then be obligated to undergo a five-year probation interval and register as a intercourse offender, ought to such registries nonetheless exist within the twenty second century.

There is all the time the likelihood that he could not serve out his sentence. If he did, he would surpass the present report for time served by Paul Geidel, who spent 68 years and 296 days in jail, beginning when he was aged 17, in 1911, on expenses of second-degree homicide.

Geidel had a 20 years-to-life sentence and truly walked out of jail in 1980 on the age of 85. He died on the age of 93 in a nursing dwelling.  In the interim, Geidel was incarcerated throughout WW1, prohibition, the melancholy, WW2, the Korean War, and the Vietnam battle.

If odds had been made accessible for gamblers in Las Vegas, by oddsmakers who analyze this stuff, I might enterprise that the percentages can be someplace round 10-1 that Keith Raniere will go away jail as Mr. Geidel did.

Most, I feel, would wager that he’ll serve the rest of his life and die in federal jail.  The common life expectancy of a 61-year-old man in America is 20 years. This is prone to be shorter for prisoners. Raniere’s life expectancy, ought to he comport with the reported estimates, is lowered to 10 years – since jail circumstances are so harsh and punishing that some counsel that an individual ages on the fee of 2-to-1 inside US prisons.

On the opposite hand, Raniere has been described as a super-athlete, an knowledgeable at judo, well being and health, and with a superlative thoughts. He would possibly, via the powers of the thoughts, have the ability to lengthen his lifespan far past that of the bizarre man, be he prisoner or freeman.

He would possibly survive his sentence and hop out of jail as a spy centenarian + sexagenarian, with two months to spare simply earlier than his one hundred and sixtieth birthday, with time sufficient to plan Vanguard Week 2120.

Raniere may additionally win on attraction.

He is interesting his conviction and is predicted to file a supplemental transient by September twentieth,  including new points and increasing points already raised by his erstwhile lawyer, Jennifer Bonjean. His attraction is earlier than the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.

Raniere’s principal argument is that he didn’t get a essentially honest trial and that expenses of intercourse trafficking and compelled labor had been hyperinflated past recognition and in contravention to the intention of lawmakers who crafted and permitted these legal guidelines.

The alleged intercourse trafficking in Raniere’s case didn’t bear any resemblance, his attorneys argue, to true intercourse trafficking, which often consists of ladies pressured to bear repeated sexual encounters over a time frame the place cash adjustments arms, with the trafficker promoting pressured intercourse of his victims.

In Raniere’s case, he argues, the sufferer, identified solely by her first title, Nicole, skilled a single sexual incident, which lasted maybe not more than an hour, and the place no cash modified arms.

The uniqueness of the fees in his case was evidenced, Raniere argues, by the decide having to undertake model new jury directions to make sure that the conduct match the cost of intercourse trafficking.

Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis – and I solely point out this as a result of it varieties part of the attraction – allotted with the sample jury instruction on intercourse trafficking – in essence telling the jury that intercourse trafficking needn’t require any precise pecuniary change [no money changed hands] however could possibly be extra intangible. The cost for trafficking could possibly be paid not in cash however within the type of a social profit.

As for pressured labor, Raniere argues that he didn’t instruct any of the victims to work underneath duress and that their pressured labor comports with no identified case with these expenses. Typically, Raniere’s attorneys argue, victims of pressured labor are low revenue, usually foreign-born, folks of little or no training and devoid of means, usually of minority standing, folks sweated into harsh working circumstances for very long time intervals with little or no pay, and from which circumstances they can’t escape.

The victims of the Raniere pressured labor had been ostensibly volunteers, they had been a few middle-class white ladies, who did things like transcribing a videotape for a number of hours or writing a report on articles – work accomplished at a pc, on the sufferer’s time and at her place, within the consolation of her dwelling and restricted to much less complete time of precise labor than what a typical pressured labor sufferer does, by way of hours, in per week.

While the principle argument towards that is that pressured labor – whether or not for 40 hours within the consolation of 1’s dwelling at a pc – or in a sweatshop working 18 hours per day for under the cost to barely feed and dress oneself – continues to be pressured labor.

And that the ladies who had been pressured to labor underneath Raniere had been coerced to take action since that they had given members of Raniere’s internal circle damning photographs and different details about themselves that struck them with the worry of the discharge of this materials which Raniere maybe unwisely known as collateral.

The racketeering expenses are additionally mistaken, in response to Raniere, who challenges the dubbing of his pals and college students as a “racketeering enterprise” whose frequent purpose was to help him, and made felony by a sequence of random, unconnected acts, most of which aren’t solely unrelated to one another however time-barred as effectively, stored inside prosecutorial vary by the “fabrication” of an enterprise that exists wholly within the prosecutors’ artistic minds and permitted to be prosecuted by a biased decide.

Or so, Raniere says.

Of course, the decide, the prosecutors and the jury disagreed, and he was convicted however within the case of the latter, Raniere’s arguments that he had a biased decide is a component and parcel of his attraction and every so often, this argument can overturn a conviction of a jury ought to the appellate judges agree.  The probability of success within the 2nd Circuit nonetheless is low. Less than 10 % of appeals are profitable.

If the attraction fails, Raniere should still have an opportunity at having fun with a future birthday past the gated jail partitions.

One is that if he appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court and the justices determine to listen to it and grant the reversal of his conviction – which I might say is distant, and had been I an oddsmaker, I might give odds of this at 100-1

Then there may be the Rule 33 movement Raniere’s attorneys plan to file.

The movement is predicated on allegedly “newly discovered” proof of tampering with a seized arduous drive and digital camera card used to assist convict Raniere of possession of kid porn and sexual exploitation of a  minor – Camila

The gravamen of the anticipated Rule 33 movement is that FBI brokers added, planted or altered proof to the seized arduous drive and a digital camera card [to establish the link between Raniere’s camera and the hard drive to show Raniere took the pictures].

Raniere alleges brokers stored the arduous drive and digital camera card of their private custody for months, relatively than turning them into the proof room inside 10 days of being seized, as FBI protocol reportedly recommends.

Adding additional to the sophisticated movement, because it has been described by people with the information of the topic, the digital camera card and/or arduous drive was modified or altered whereas in FBI custody, the digital camera card was accessed by an individual or individuals unknown whereas in FBI custody, dates seem to have been modified manually, and folder names seem to have been altered, with one curious discovery of what would usually be an impossibility: a backup folder being youthful than its contents.

Perhaps all of this may be defined in some harmless approach or maybe the knowledge stated to be contained within the forthcoming movement is in error, however these are critical allegations.

Though Raniere has claimed that he’s among the many high three downside solvers on the earth, he’s not, in response to sources, totally reliant on his personal self-proclaimed genius however is supported by, reportedly, 4 distinguished cyber specialists. These specialists have been paid by Raniere’s supporters, but his supporters argue the caliber of those specialists is such that they might not falsify findings and harm their credibility for the sake of Raniere and in opposition to the FBI.

In addition, the studies purportedly state that the specialists make such statements as that the tampering by the FBI of proof is clear-cut, convincing, stunning, surprisingly laden with “fingerprints” and completely provable through different specialists.

In quick, the studies, Raniere supporters say, unequivocally level to tampering – and proof will present this past an inexpensive doubt.

All this stays to be seen, after all, and little doubt we are going to see this if and when the Rule 33 motionis filed.

The excellent news is that this stuff are inclined to proof extra agency than opinion and affirmation bias. Whether it’s in favor of the birthday boy or towards, is just not related. The info will possible exhibit themselves or fail to on account of inadequate proof, which is tantamount to saying there isn’t any proof.

However, if there may be proof, and there could also be for it’s effectively established that forensic proof within the cyber world usually leaves infallible traces, and we will see this proof.

Then we are going to know if the supporters of Raniere live in a delusional world, or if they’ve stumbled upon an egregious crime by authorities officers, one far higher than any Keith Raniere has been convicted of committing.

As we’ve got beforehand written, Frank Report takes no place on this allegation of proof tampering besides that, ought to it’s true, it’s past disturbing, that the proof in query that allegedly was tampered with or planted or someway not discovered initially on the seized arduous drive however positioned there later [whether it be true photos of Camila when she was 15 or not] is probably probably the most vital single challenge in your entire trial.

The discovery of contraband photos of 15-year-old Camila was the ocean change of your entire case.

If there may be even a granule of fact contained on this Rule 33 movement, bolstered by purported cyber specialists’ studies, it shouldn’t be buried or crushed again by a technicality, or obscured from public scrutiny to guard the great title of the FBI or simply because the person who alleges it’s despised and to many a despicable creature who deserves to be in a solitary cell, alone, on his birthday and to by no means see freedom once more.

If a toxic tree grew in Brooklyn, whether or not it was used to convict the satan himself, it can not stand.

That stated, there’s a lengthy solution to go from mere allegations to true proof. I appeared on the authentic findings by one knowledgeable of Indian nationality. I’m informed that there are three US specialists, who had entry to rather more precise proof, whose studies are much more in depth and damning.

I have to additionally low cost for the bias of supporters and preserve an open thoughts. It could also be true or unfaithful, however it’s unreasonable to make any declare till the proof is offered.

However, ought to it’s true and there was tampering, there stands an excellent likelihood that Raniere will get at the least a brand new trial, for the reason that Camila proof was by far crucial proof used to convict him at trial and he or she represented the one arguably non-adult to be known as a sufferer.

I can effectively think about that Raniere, like most of us on our birthdays, takes a second to acknowledge the fun and sorrows we’ve had in life.

If it’s true what his critics say about Raniere, that he’s a psychopath incapable of regular human feelings or ideas, he maybe feels nothing however annoyance in his cell on the reminder of his punishment – and his segregation from all humanity on the date of his beginning – a date beforehand used for his followers to provide him the tribute not often seen by anybody in need of the Caesars.

It is his birthday and it’s important to marvel: Raniere has not skilled a second of freedom in three years, not touched the inexperienced grass or walked the fields, or, if you’ll pardon an oft-repeated joke discovered on these pages, donned his birthday go well with with a comely, slender woman, this man with a purported twenty wives. And birthdays might be arduous or candy. It is probably greater than idle curiosity to marvel if Raniere feels that any of his fall from luxurious and splendor to isolation was any of his personal fault.

In any occasion, although he might not be prone to hear it and to the extent it might be potential, Happy Birthday Keith.