From bump’s link:
3 years is not good enough, but it’s something.
Do you have a site for any others?
No, it certainly would not. But that would be a very rare occurrence. Especially since if you are robbing convenience stores, you are unlikely to be able to afford a good lawyer and even less likely to be able to come up with 50K for restitution.
But even you did, it would be apples and oranges. My point being that if you have the funds to pay for a good lawyer and be able to pay the fine, it wouldn’t really hurt that much. I am fairly certain that you would be hard-pressed to find a person in prison who wouldn’t have chosen to pay a fine instead of the prison sentence.
The problem is the people who committed the fraud do not suffer the consequences (usually).
Look at the likes of Deutsche Bank which over the last few years has run up an impressive list of major infractions (there have been a few more since that story was published). The banks pays a fine but that just punishes the shareholders.
Or HSBC which admitted to massive money laundering schemes for drug lords and freaking terrorists but only had to pay a fine. There are people in jail for LIFE for selling $20 of weed and you do not think these bankers deserve prison time?
Worse, the people responsible got their bonuses and fat salaries breaking the rules years ago. We cannot sue them personally so the worst that happens is they get fired. But, by-and-large they don’t.
So, there is literally no reason for them to play by the rules when there is no accountability. Indeed, the incentive is to break the law.
Then you’d end up paying more money. I’m not sure where the issue is there.
I don’t have any cites other than the two links in this thread and have no knowledge about the case beyond skimming those two articles. Opening this thread earlier today was the first time I’d ever even heard about it.
You’re the one that brought up the c-store thing, I was just running with your hypothetical.
This is true. I think you have to look at this not from the point of view of ‘white collar criminals’ but rather ‘white collar crimes’.
People that commit non-violent crimes that typically involve money are going to, generally, see less jail time than people that present a [physical] threat to the public or can’t convince the judge they won’t jump bail.
A wealthy person that does a million dollars in damage to a mall is going to harsher punishment than a homeless person playing Three Card Monte in the subway.
I can imagine a situation where monetary damages and other oversight actions are imposed on the current corporation, causing the loss to be borne by current shareholders. The issue is whether those penalties/reactions are large enough to deter malfeasance. If the penalties are sufficient, perhaps the current shareholders could pursue private action against the officers they feel responsible.
Someone wiser than me will have to weigh in on the economic benefits of shielding corporations and corporate officers. I’d better step out of the discussion, as I mostly slept thru Corporations in law school!
FYI, he was actually convicted of mail fraud.
Actually, you’d probably be charged with two separate crimes- one for robbery, and one for illegally setting off a fire system, or something like that.
The problem as I understand some of you to be articulating it, is that the penalties of illegally setting off a fire system are statutory, and unrelated to any damage. So the guy sets off the fire system, gets a year in prison or whatever, even though he caused an immense amount of damage.
I think the typical remedy here would be that the stores involved would sue the person to recover damages, but if you’re robbing mall convenience stores, you probably don’t have that much money, or will ever make enough money to pay that off. Them’s the breaks; that’s why you carry insurance.
It should be noted that the settlement was paid by a parent company which didn’t own Sapa at the time of the fraud and couldn’t have been involved in it. They bought the company, and therefore acquired its obligations.
Convince me that in nineteen years of falsifying their records, this corporation made less than forty-six million dollars and is now looking at a net loss.
The usual pattern is a corporation breaks the law and makes five hundred million and if it gets caught it pays a fifty million dollar fine. Paying the fine is just seen as a cost of doing business; like a robber having to buy a gun.
(bolding mine)“The guy most directly responsible” is the lab supervisor?
Outrage over lack of criminal sentences for some white collar criminals, or disproportionately light sentences in comparison to those of other criminals is highly understandable.
It’s also false that white collar criminals in general “get a pass”.
Perhaps I need to be more specific.
When I say ‘White Collar’, I am referring to executives of companies committing crimes.
:dubious:
Once again I have failed.
When I say ‘White Collar’, I am referring to executives of legitimate companies committing crimes through the business.
We cannot count someone like Madoff. Madoff’s firm was sham from the get-go. The fact that his clients and many of his employees did not this till the very end notwithstanding. His firm was less legitimate than a mob front business. A mob front business still had to do the occasional legit job.
I’d say that article shows the opposite. It lists the longest sentences ever handed out to white collar criminals. And some of those guys - who were setting the records - are receiving sentences of “only” forty years.
Sure, forty years is a long prison sentences. But I knew hundreds of regular criminals who were serving sentences longer than that. And if I knew hundreds of them, then there must have been thousands of them out there.
If a forty year sentences gets you in the record book, it means people like you are receiving relatively light sentences.
Or, as Robert Reich put it, “I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.”
He’s the guy deliberately directing the falsification of the lab and testing results.
And that’s the thing- you can’t just wave your hands and say the CEO or plant manager should be jailed- he may have done something stupid like created a perverse incentive that the lab manager latched onto for doing his falsifications.
You’d have to prove that someone above him deliberately commanded him to falsify this stuff.
I suspect that since the company and the DOJ settled out of court, that all that stuff was extremely murky and not as clear as everyone seems to think it must have been. Otherwise they’d have been less inclined to settle out of court.
Look at it this way- let’s say the CEO said something movie villain-esque like “I don’t care what you need do; we HAVE to start shipping more products.”, with a clear implication to those actually in the room, that he means for them to start cheating.
How are you going to prove that’s what he meant, months, if not years after the fact? The depositions are going to say that he said what he said, and his lawyers are going to argue that there’s an unspoken “within the law” implication to what he said- that saying “I don’t care what you need to do” is a figure of speech, not a literal statement, etc…
So they can’t really go after the CEO in that case, but they can go after the lab manager, who seems to have been caught dead to rights.
But what is his motive? How does he benefit from the falsification??
No, you have to prove that someone knew about it and profited from it.
But, what about the company itself? It’s a person that committed a crime and should face jail time, or the equivalent for an artificial person – maybe the inability for that person to conduct business for the length of the sentence. If a company can have a religious preference (like Hobby Lobby) and have free speech rights (like Citizens United), it should also be able to face jail time.
Sure, but that motive doesn’t have to be illegal. Let’s say he gets a bonus for reducing the QA cycle time, with the understood caveat that everything actually has to pass. He’s got an incentive to fudge stuff without even being directed to do anything illegal.
I don’t think there’s even a question of profit involved- if he was directed to do it and it was knowingly illegal, that’s probably just as criminal. For example, if a company’s in dire financial straits, and management orders someone to cut illegal corners to ship product faster, that’s illegal to order AND to carry out, regardless of whether anyone actually profits from it.
Or… you’d have to prove that someone above him was aware of it, and deliberately turned a blind eye in order to profit from it. It’s the intent, not whether anyone actually profited from it or not.
Okay, how about no incarceration, but a public flogging with a cat’o nine tails?
I know I’d buy a ticket to watch.
[Bolding mine]
The problem with doing that is that all the lowest level employees of that company, who had no say wrt the white collar crime, would be out of work.