Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jed S. Rakoff is an American lawyer and federal judge serving as a senior United States district judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. He was nominated by President Bill Clinton and entered duty on the 1st of March 1996.
In 2002, Rakoff declared the federal death penalty unconstitutional in United States v. Quinones. He found that innocent people were sentenced to death with greater frequency than previously understood and that their convictions would often not be corrected until long after the fact, creating an undue risk of executing the innocent. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed his ruling later that year.
Rakoff rejected the $33 million SEC settlement with Bank of America on the 14th of September 2009, calling it a contrivance designed to give the SEC a facade of enforcement while letting bank management avoid accountability, all at the expense of shareholders. He forced the parties to return with a more complete account of events and a larger penalty before he reluctantly approved a revised deal.
Rajat Gupta, the former managing partner of McKinsey and a Goldman Sachs board member, was convicted in 2012 of leaking confidential board information to hedge-fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam. Rakoff sentenced Gupta to two years in prison, describing his conduct as an egregious breach of trust. The conviction and sentence were affirmed on appeal by the Second Circuit in 2014.
Sitting by designation on the Ninth Circuit in 2015, Rakoff held that an insider who discloses confidential information to a relative without receiving anything in return is guilty of insider trading, creating a circuit split with the Second Circuit. The Supreme Court granted review and unanimously affirmed Rakoff's opinion in 2016, overturning the Second Circuit's narrower standard.
In August 2019, Rakoff sentenced Cesar Sayoc to 20 years in prison for the October 2018 mail bombing attempts. Sayoc had pleaded guilty to 65 felony counts for sending explosive devices to more than a dozen critics of President Trump. Rakoff said the sentence was no more and no less than what Sayoc deserved.