Holly Hester is the writer/producer of Sabrina, The Teenage Witch and The Drew Carey Show. She was courteus enough to grace us Finns by visiting our country on Midsummer. On the 20th of June she trespassed on the border-zone of Finland and Russia. She was caught by the Finnish border guard and now 2 months later her fines were verified to be 5500 USD.
She is reported to have said something like, “It is not fair to punish me for having high income.”.
So the question is:
What’s the legal praxis in the USA. Is a fine always a fixed amount, no matter how rich/poor you are? I’m not sure if the term day-fine is used over there. Here it means that for example from a petty larceny you could get 10 day-fines and the amount you have to pay depends on your income. I understand that at least companies have to pay their fines in ratio to their turnover.
Wouldn’t it be unfair if rich people weren’t affected by fines.
Fines in the U.S. tend to be either fixed (for fairly trivial offenses) or given a limited variability. (". . .punishable by fines, not to exceed $200" sort of things.) So a judge might asses a lower fee on someone in a case where the judge found mitigating circumstances and the maximum for a case where the judge determined that the violation was flagrant. The maximum fine will have been defined in the law, and whether the judge considers the offender’s wealth is generally up to the judge.
Scaling the fine to the offender’s income is not practiced in the U.S. (Within the framework of the limited variability, one might have found a judge who routinely subjected wealthy people to the maximum and poor people to the minimum–if very many socialist-leaning lawyers had became judges. There will be some who would claim that the opposite is true, that the wealthy judges look out for their own and penalize the poor more harshly. Outside of individual incidents, I doubt that that is common.)
I am just going to second what Tom said that fines are pretty much a set fine that has no bearing on what the offender’s income is.
I have always thought that a sliding scale fine based on income would be more effective than the set fine. I know it would have been nicer for me when I got my ticket and had scrimp forf a while to make ends meet.
You might want to ask Michael Milken his thoughts on this subject.
Michael Milken wasn’t fined according to his income. He was forced to return his ill-gotten gains. In other words, they calculated how much of his fortune was illegally obtained and fined him that amount.
If interested you can read more about Finnish fines from here. It’s about traffic fines.
I generally agree with the previous responses. However, I have heard judges reduce fines (which by definition would be for criminal or quasi-criminal offenses) because the offender was poor. It’s not usually done, though.
The related concept of punitive damages does take into account the defendant’s assets, though. These are rare. (They are imposed in a small minority of civil cases where the wrongdoing is particularly flagrant.) If punitive damages are found to be warranted, the fact-finder (jury or judge) recieves evidence of the wrongdoer’s wealth.