Why are these people never charged with murder?

After watching a Believe It or Not show on TV, and learning about how this multimillionaire, Henry Flagler, built the overseas railway to the Florida Keys that eventually was responsible for the deaths of over 1000 people, I started thinking. To avoid the labor regulations of the time, he hired Illegals and bums and they dropped by the score. Then, in some areas, instead of building bridges across the shallows separating the keys, he filled in the seabed up to track level, ignoring warnings that he should not do this. So when the hurricane of the century hit, two things happened. People who had survived previous ones gathered at a spot to await the train, and perished when a tidal wave hit. His filling in miles of open water with track bed stopped the normal safety valve of the ocean during storms, piled up the water and generated the tidal wave.

He cut corners to make himself a hero and killed indirectly over 1000 people. He’s considered a Great Man in Miami and the Keys today for all of his works.

He should be considered a selfish killer.

Should people in major companies who make decisions, based on cost, that get others kill be treated as killers?

Look at the recent Goodyear tire fiasco. Goodyear executives knew up to two years previously that the tires were defective but someone made the decision to not recall them or warn the public. People died. No one went to jail.

In Vietnam, the first version of the M-16 jammed when it got dirty and this was known and lots of American Soldiers got killed. The people who made the decision to ship the defective guns were never sent to jail.

The Corvair flipped over, was advertised as being something like a jeep, the makers knew it was dangerous and someone approved it being sold with no warnings. The government had to ban it from the roads because so many people got killed and hurt in it. No one went to jail.

A Suzuki 4x4 was top heavy with a high center of gravity and it flipped over easily. So easily that buyers rapidly got rid of them. The makers knew this long before selling it but it took people getting killed and the government stepping in to get it pulled from the market. The person or persons who decided to sell this thing to the public were never jailed.

So, we know rich people and major industries will happily kill and injure people until they get caught, but there are usually 1 or 2 decision makers who decide to sell the product. Shouldn’t these people be jailed as killers?

Why aren’t they?

Flagler died before the tidal wave hit, but he allowed his workers to die by the dozens just to make a name for himself and instead of being a criminal today, he is considered a hero. Why?

So, why should the people responsible for approving known defective products for sale not brought up on charges?

Because in our judicial system one must prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that these people intended to commit murder. Maybe some of our more learned friends will elaborate further.

Quasi

Lack of intent = manslaughter, which is also a criminal offence.

Currently here in the UK prosecutions can be brought against directors with a controlling interest in the company, i.e. they can be held personally responsible for the deaths. Needless to say there have been few sucessful prosecutions. I would guess it favours large corporations since the structure of these tend to be more complex, and so it’s pretty much impossible to prove directors have control at that level.

Consequently there has been a desire to change the law here:
(sorry due to commas in the URL I can’t seem to get this to format properly)

http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4021319,00.html

the article suggests that the US has corporate manslaughter laws. I don’t know how these work (i.e. whether the corporation can be held responsible or whether individuals have to be identified). I guess the problem lies in who would be brave and rich enough to bring a case against a massive corporation
with millions of dollars to spend on defending themselves.

Your knee seems to be jerking a tad, Doris. Take a deep, calming breath when posting in the future.

I agree that such business decisions (ones that result in corpses) is reprehensible behavior. But they are, in the end, business decisions. Can the businessmen forsee all the possibly outcomes of their actions? No. They do the best with what they have, balancing “cost” and “quality”.

It sucks sometimes, yes. But, under the current law, it is by no means murder.

There have been at least two successful prosecutions for corporate manslaughter in the UK. One was the managing director of an activity centre responsible for the deaths of four schoolchildren in a canoeing disaster, jailed for three years in 1994, the other was some chemical company where an employee died after inhaling a noxious chemical.

IMHO, this isn’t anywhere near enough. We’ve had a series of rail disasters in recent times, and I suspect no-one (personally) will be brought to book.

Spoofe said

We’re not talking here about a slightly defective pair of trainers. People died as a result of decisions taken (or not taken) by the heads of these companies. I think it would really focus the minds of some of these people to know that they could be personally responsible for their decisions.

Since Xeres has presented a more eloquent argument,I’ll stick to answering criticisms of my previous post, rather than try to re-express what I meant:

You seems to have misread the tone. I was perfectly calm when posting, and both knees are unbruised since they have most certainly not been in contact with my desk :slight_smile:

I did not used the term murder, but manslaughter. And I was refering to the current state in the UK, partly because that’s where I am, partly because I recall a sucessful prosectution against a company when 4 kids died not far from here (the same case to which Xeres is referring).

As I said, I don’t know the state of play in the US.

The OP suggested that in some cases, the corporation/senior executives knew of serious problems but decided to ignore them. That more than “sucks” and indeed does suggest that they could have forseen that their product was potentially dangerous(I am assuming here that the OP is factually correct). They should know a hell of a lot more about their product that an ordinary member of the public.

I think the wiggle room resides in the fact that no one is held accountable for providing 100% risk-free products or environments. It then becomes a “where do we cross the line” argument.

There is not a construction site in the world where someone can’t be killed. There is not a car sold today where the manufacturer isn’t fully aware that the design will contribute, to some extent, to future deaths. For example, so long as manufacturers produce cars that can travel over 5 MPH (or pick your own ridiculously low MPH), they (and we, the consumers) have decided that the inherent risk of dying from losing control of a speeding car is acceptable. And this risk is real and reasonably predictable–as the cars roll off the line, we can be sure people will die as a result.

For many years, the prevailing consumer inclination was NOT to purchase airbags (which were not always mandatory). The cost wasn’t worth the added safety, most people decided. There are always different chassis and engine designs, and obviously there can only be one that is optimally safe.

Should we demand that only that type be sold, or do we allow people and companies some latitude in deciding that there is a balance to be struck that involves cost, safety, and even frivolous things like how attractive a product is (otherwise, forbid the sale of sports cars, which are simply not as safe to the driver as an SUV)?

That’s why there are regulations, standards and regulatory agencies–to take the guesswork, as best we can, out of determining what “safe” means. To the extent that something is not legally defined, it then becomes open to argument. Where was the line crossed?

If the fact that a corporation is fully aware that its product can–WILL–cause some deaths is suffcicient reason to prosecute, no one would sell anything. And that’s not to say some of the examples provided didn’t involve legitimate scumbags who did not care a whit who lived or died. I’m just answering the OP: they aren’t prosecuted as you suggest because even if what you state is indisputably true–there was beforehand knowledge of risk, or the work environment wasn’t 100% safe–that’s not enough by itself.

Bob said

You’re absolutely correct, and in the normal course of things as long as the relevant safety-at-work laws were adhered to, there would be no basis for a criminal investigation. However there was a case in the UK (don’t know quite as much about this as my previous two) where a temporary worker was taken on in (IIRC) a shipyard, given no training, no hard-hat and was subsequently killed by a head injury. I’m afraid I can’t tell you whether it went to court but I do know the Crown Prosecution Service was building a case against the directors at some point. That’s the kind of case I’m talking about, where negligence or similar can be proven. And my point is, how do you think the fact that it will be easier to prosecute directors affect the quality of (for instance) their decisions on, and monitoring of, safety procedures within their company?

Construction sites have a well known risk factor before employees hire on. Labor laws and working laws require certain safety gear to cut down on fatal accidents and construction companies have been sued and people jailed for failing to have required safety things installed in the event of a death.

But, in the Goodyear incident, decision makers knew of the fault in the tires, and kept it quiet, over protests of safety inspectors. They weighed the cost of a recall against the potential costs of possible lawsuits involving possible deaths and chose to kill people. Just business. Just business is no excuse when it comes to human lives. That type of business attitude need to be expunged.

Again, every consumer knows the inherent risk of driving, but when an automobile maker knows that the car is defective and ships it anyhow, then he is putting cost above lives. Like, big cars tend to keep people from being killed but several types of small and compact cars are made so cheaply that people die in them more frequently. Almost all makers of small cars took out two vital things to save a few bucks; First, the side impact reinforcement bars in the doors, and Second, the roof braces designed to keep the roof from crushing in on rollover. Neither of these were tremendously expensive to install.

When you add things like explosive gas tanks, cornering problems, steering problems and easy tipping, you have a death trap. Several makes of cars like this have been shipped out, with the makers knowing the car had these problems and it took lawsuits to recall them, but the people who chose to release the thing were never jailed.

You expect your car to protect you in an impact, up to a certain extent. When the roof reinforcements were removed along with the door bars, no one was ever informed. They were informed, previously, when such things were included in the car, as a selling point.

If you make a business decision to knowingly send a flawed product to the market, and someone died because of the flaw, then you’ve committed manslaughter.

Xerxes…

Yeah. Sucks, don’t it? It’s very, very easy to point fingers in retrospect, of course.

Doris…

My apologies. I just thought you were taking a large leap in logic when you suggested that corporation leaders should be charged with murder. Manslaughter, yes… Wrongful death, yes… but not Murder, IMOSHO.

From http://www.emporia.edu/ibed/jour/jou21shr/johnny/article3.htm

In the above case, there was a failure to inform their employees that they were working with cyanide.
Other instances:
Valujet maintenance workers charged with manslaughter:
http://www.freep.com/news/latestnews/qlatene14.htm

More examples:

Except for the Valujet case, all of the above appear to relate to occupational hazards.

I can see a problem with charging an executive for manslaughter in a product liability case. Many consumer products have an inherant level of risk. Autos come to mind: use a car long enough and someone will die. Making a car (or any other product), “as safe as possible”, may not be sensible; rather the goal should be to take cost-effective safety measures. For example, spending $1 billion dollars to save 10 lives down the road, is likely to displace quite a bit of other activity in the economy, some of it which would be life-promoting (eg health care spending, etc.). OTOH, if the risk imposed was especially egregious and the costs entirely manageable, then a manslaughter case might be appropriate.

The problem with the early M-16s was a complex one and not entirely the fault of the weapon.

The 5.56mm ammunintion for the M-16 was originally speficied to use an extruded powder but was changed to a ball powder that hadn’t been thoroghly tested in field conditions. Ball powder in itself isn’t a problem but the particular powder had a high percentage of calcium carbonate, 1/2% IIRC, to retard deterioration from heat. Powder acididifies when it’s stored in hot conditons, causing extrememly high and erratic pressures that can blow up a rifle. The excess caused hard deposits to build up in the gas system of the rifle, rendering them inoperable.

That didn’t make much difference to the marines that died with jammed weapons but it’s not as simple as somone deciding to send defective rifles into the field.

We already know that car makers have deliberately sent dangerously defective products to the selling floor in the past and said nothing about it.

The Isuzu P’up truck came with a weak fire wall on the driver’s side on standard transmission. Use the truck a lot and the wall cracked and without warning, the shift cable would pull through, causing you to loose the ability to shift, which caused some serious problems on the road. I had one of these trucks and it did that to me in the middle of traffic. I had mine welded with a steel plate, and when I later took the truck in for some engine repair, I asked the shop manager if they had problems with their trucks doing that. After beating around the bush, he said ‘only if you overuse the truck’ and informed me that they stocked repair plates for the firewall.

They already knew about the bad spot, but never told us when we bought the truck!! Plus the Isuzu P’up with a cab window to access a cap, drew exhaust in through it due to some odd shape of the muffler system. The only way to stop it was to replace the entire exhaust pipe from the muffler out. If you had no a/c and drove, like on rainy days with the rear window open, the fumes got intense.

Aside from picking examples into pieces, we all know that major companies have made decisions that kill people. Like installing the crash supports in the small cars would cost around $100 or less per car. Car makers chose to remove them, increasing the amount of deaths and serious injury in side impacts and roll over.

Someone in the company makes the key decision to produce or release an unsafe car or product and not tell the public about it. It has been going on for years. Flagler was only one of many millionaires of the time who thought nothing of killing off his workers.

There is the story of a wealthy retreat in the mountains above a city, where they dammed a creek to make a big lake, but then ignored maintenance on the dam. The richest people in the nation went there to play and when inspectors informed them that the dam was faulty, they ignored him. Then they took out overflow pipes to keep sport fish they liked to catch from escaping. They were told that the damn needed to be fixed and the overflow pipes put in but they never did.

The dam broke one night and wiped out the town below, killing hundreds of people.

None of the rich folks were ever formally charged, though they abandoned the retreat right afterwards. Those in charge of or who owned the retreat should have been charged but never were.

Pneumatic brakes were available for the railroads years before they installed them. They continued using the dangerous process of hand setting the brakes with brakemen running across the roofs of moving cars. At that time, the railroads were having 1 or two wrecks a day! The profit making owners did not want to spend the money to install them, though they had the cash. The government finally forced them to do so, along with making RR cars better.

In the meantime, over 2000 people had died in train wrecks between the time pneumatic brakes became available to when they were installed. That’s 2000 human beings killed because the wealthy owners were more concerned about huge profits than the lives of their clients. Not one rail road executive nor owner was ever jailed. Some are considered American Heroes.

This is not right.

maybe he’ll come back as a flea.
(nothing against fleas!)

My comments to Sir Doris should actually have been directed at the OP. I made the mistake when I threw in my agreement with Doris, then it all got garbled during editing…

Anyway, Doris, I apologize, and I won’t make that mistake again. As for CheezedOff, well, I just think it’s a tad too extreme with charging corporate execs with “murder” in such cases.

Thank you, carry on…

Modern safety engineering is NOT about making something as safe as possible. It’s about making it as safe as possible within the constraints of cost, market approval, competitiveness, etc.

We can’t afford all the safety we want. Given that, somewhere along the line someone has to say, “If we spend X dollars more, we can save Y more lives, but we can’t afford to do that and still make a profit.”

There’s nothing wrong with this. In fact, a company would be negligent if it DIDN’T approach this decision mathematically from a sound engineering and fiscal management strategy.

A trivial example: Some deaths in auto crashes are due to seatbelt failure. A safety engineer knows those numbers. He knows that .000005% of the cars that come off the line will kill someone when the seatbelt fails. Multiplied by the number of cars estimated to be sold, and he might be able to tell you that 2.7 people are likely to die as a result of failing seatbelts. So, he looks at the design, and says, “well, we can go to a titanium clasp, and weave kevlar fibers into the belt webbing. This will reduce failures by X%, and save 2 lives per year. This will increase the cost of the car by $42. Therefore, I do not believe the added safety represents a reasonable design improvement.”

But God help the company that has this document fall into the media’s hands, especially after a cute little girl dies because her seatbelt failed in a crash. And some of you would no doubt think this engineer should be charged with murder.

But here’s the rub - there are HUNDREDS or even thousands of such decisions in the design of the car. How about a titanium frame? Perhaps a roll cage? 5 point harnesses? Self-sealing gas tanks? Special protective cages around gas tanks? Aluminum braided fuel lines?

If all of these decisions were made with safety as the only factor, no one would be able to afford cars.

Here’s another real example: We all know that effective braking saves lives. And we know that disc brakes are more effective than drum brakes. But they are more expensive. So you can still buy cars with drum brakes. If an engineer who approved the design of a car with drum brakes could show that the decrease in braking effectiveness was likely to cause 43 deaths per year, is he wrong for approving the design?

What your speaking of is the Johnstown flood in 1889, it’s considered one of the worst engineering disasters in US history. 2,200 people died.

Cite please? As far as I know the Corvair was never banned from the roads, despite Ralph Naders efforts. With all the bad press nobody would buy one and GM killed the line because of bad sales. In fact the car wasn’t that bad in the origonal design, but as a cost saving measure they decided to nix the rear anti-sway bar. Bad idea, it was a mid-engined car and needed the sway bar to deal with the extra weight in the back. Most likely any car on the road today has an updated suspension.

The Corvair still has an active following of collectors and drivers. It’s never been banned from roads, and in fact has pretty nice handling characteristics.

The main problem with the Corvair had to do with the engine not being in the front. Therefore, it had a tendency to break free in back and swap ends in hard cornering.

Another car with this ‘horrible’ design? The Porsche 911. And plenty of those have been in accidents due to the back end fishtailing around. But for some reason that car is considered an engineering marvel, while the Corvair was slagged.

My personal opinion is that the Corvair is the victim of a hatchet job by Ralph Nader, and didn’t deserve the reputation it got. But I don’t expect anything more from Nader - he’s not an engineer or a scientist, but still passes judgement on those subjects he doesn’t understand. He’s wrong far more times than he’s right.

The problem isn’t that they’re making those calculations, it’s how they determine the values placed on lives. Only the market values count, and a life (or a limb, or an eye, or the ability to walk) can’t be bought and sold and therefore has no market value. The only way they gain any value is through the tort system, i.e. how much the corporation would have to pay in a lawsuit. The problem is this system tremendously undervalues lives. The car company can afford the high-powered attorneys, reducing their chances of having to pay, and most suits won’t even be brought. The injured party has to prove the seatbelt caused the injury, among other things, which can be difficult. And right now there’s a movement for “tort reform,” so these corporations can be liable for even less.

Inherently dangerous products are treated differently. There have been some interesting cases brought against gun manufacturers for gun deaths, which of course is a bit problematic since guns are designed to cause deaths. We all know that there is a chance of dying in a car, but we expect that our refridgerator won’t kill us.

It is also assumed that workers in dangerous professions are paid more to compensate for the greater risks. This works in a perfect labor market, where people freely make choices. However, with mass poverty and a globalized economy, there are many people who don’t have the option of turning down a job. (You should see what’s happening to illegal immigrants from Mexico in the poultry industry, for example.)

I think the OP’s point is that corporations should be held to the same standard as individuals. Different forms of homicide require different states of mind; for manslaughter it’s generally negligence or recklessness. A CEO who acts negligently or recklessly, causing a death, should be prosecuted for manslaughter, just as you are I would be.

CheezedOff,

Twice you’ve referred to the “Goodyear tire fiasco” of last year. It wasn’t Goodyear; it was Bridgestone.

Carry on.

Sua