Crime, Punishment and ExxonMobil

[marmar]

from HuffPost:




Robert Weissman
Crime, Punishment and ExxonMobil
Posted July 11, 2008 | 11:15 AM (EST)




Last month witnessed the extraordinary contrast of two perspectives on crime, punishment and ExxonMobil.

Just two days after leading climate change scientist James Hansen told the U.S. Congress that he believed ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel company CEOs "should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature" for their role in delaying a serious global response to climate change, the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that a $2.5 billion punitive judgment against Exxon for the Valdez oil spill disaster denied the company the "sense of fairness" to which it is entitled.

Each of these proclamations is extremely significant in its own right.

The Supreme Court's ruling has the more obvious direct importance. Operating in the framework of maritime law, where it is free to establish its own rules in the absence of Congressional guidance, the Court held in a 5-3 ruling that punitive damage awards should not exceed compensatory damages. In other words, the punitive fine imposed by a civil jury should not be greater than the harm the jury found a defendant caused to a plaintiff by its wrongful act.

As a matter of law, this was a remarkable ruling -- a hyper-activist, policy-driven, non-originalist action by a faction of the Court that claims to defer to legislative determinations or seek its legitimacy in the Constitution, law or strongly rooted history. And the policy choices made by the Court are not only corporate-friendly and harmful to the victims of corporate wrongdoing and the environment, they are remarkably poorly argued. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-weissman/crime-punishment-and-exxo_b_112146.html