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Month: August 2022

Too big to jail

Impunity for the king and his friends

Photo: Sang Hyun Cho via Wikipedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

“For the king’s friends, impunity. For his enemies, the law,” goes the saying in various iterations. Javier Corrales, a professor of political science at Amherst College with expertise on Latin America, warned that Donald Trump was using the law like an autocrat to erode democracy and concentrate his own power.

“The goal is always,” Corrales wrote in March 2020, to “abuse and ignore the law to reward loyalists and perhaps even punish critics.” In fact, Trump just threatened CNN with a lawsuit. Because threatening is easy. It’s what he does.

Trump’s brazenness simply spotlights a truth long hidden in plain sight: Lady Justice peeks through her blindfold. The system has always protected the elite and punished the rest. Blind justice remains aspirational.

Climate One‘s broadcast over the weekend examined PG&E corporate misfeasance/malfeasance that led to massive, deadly California wildfires and its post hoc efforts to correct them. Host Greg Dalton began, “In 2020, the California utility Pacific Gas and Electric pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter for deaths resulting from a failed power line. But not one person from PG&E served time.”

Katherine Blunt of The Wall Street Journal says the judgment “speaks to this kind of difficult understanding and convoluted world of corporate liability. This wasn’t a financial crime or you know a white-collar crime that was victimless. I mean these are homicide charges. And it’s kind of remarkable to consider the process the prosecutors had to go through to convict the company on these charges.”

Blunt wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

It is unusual for major corporations to face homicide charges. Such charges typically require prosecutors to prove knowledge of risk or intent of misconduct among individuals within the company, legal experts say.

“Criminal charges against a corporation are rare, and manslaughter charges are especially rare,” said Will Thomas, a business law professor at University of Michigan. “It’s an indication of just how bad some of PG&E’s activities have been.”

“Corporations are people, my friend,” Mitt Romney said famously while running for president in 2011. Various court rulings and Citizens United treat them as such (1 U.S.C. section 1). But these artificial persons are friends of the king. Even in the rare cases when they are convicted of multiple homicides, these persons are privileged. They can neither be jailed nor terminated. PG&E received fines amounting to no more than a slap on the wrist and went about its business. Changed, says new CEO Patti Poppe, but you or I would still be sitting in a cell.

PG&E pleaded guilty the same month Corrales warned of Trump’s “autocratic legalism” in the New York Times.

Corrales’ emphasis was on how Trump might abuse the legal system to punish his enemies, not on how it might protect him and them. The problem the justice system in this country faces after Jan. 6 is that, as the nearest thing the U.S. has to a king (or former king), successfully prosecuting Trump for federal crimes including fomenting a violent insurrection will be as or more difficult as convicting a corporate person, even for homicide.

The chances Trump will ever see the inside of a jail cell if prosecuted and convicted are slim. That’s not a bug in our legal system. It’s a feature.

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.