Get Out of Jail Free

[marmar]

from the American Prospect:


Get Out of Jail Free
JESSE EISINGER JULY 12, 2015

How prosecutors and courts collude to keep corrupt executives from doing prison time.

In these partisan times, here’s an assertion that cuts across party lines: The United States faces a problem of “overcriminalization,” an explosion of statutes that give the government extraordinary powers to make felons of us all.

In 2013, the House Judiciary Committee formed a special task force to address this problem, with Democrats and Republicans signing on. The right-leaning Heritage Foundation has made it one of its signature issues. The Supreme Court has referred to it.

But while Democrats and progressives mainly have in mind the excesses of mass incarceration, the right more often has a different concern: that business is drowning in regulatory rules that transform everyday business decisions into transgressions. Further, the argument goes, these transgressions are being punished with greater fervor than ever before. Last year, I attended a securities law conference where the chairman of Paul, Weiss—one of the most respected white-collar defense law firms in the country—decried regulators and prosecutors competing to outdo each other with the most “draconian” punishments conceivable.

There is something wrong here. While it’s true that the United States is throwing many people in prison—disproportionately African American males for nonviolent offenses—corporate criminals are getting away with their crimes. There may be plenty of laws on the books, but they aren’t being put to effect for the one percent. Almost everyone knows that no top executive from a major financial firm went to prison in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But it goes beyond that. No officials at the highest levels from BP were convicted in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. In June, a jury acquitted a BP executive for lying about the spill.

.....(snip).....

He convincingly demonstrates that the Justice Department is scared to indict the biggest companies in America. One major reason for this is the Arthur Andersen case. The Justice Department of the George W. Bush administration indicted Andersen, then one of the top accounting firms, in 2002 for destroying documents relating to its audit of the books of Enron, the notorious energy fraud. Andersen, plainly, had been an enabler of Enron’s deceptions. A jury found Andersen guilty of obstruction of justice and it went out of business, throwing tens of thousands of people out of work. A unanimous Supreme Court threw out the conviction a few years later on the grounds that the jury instructions were faulty. ..............(more)

http://prospect.org/article/get-out-jail-free-0

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