Prosecuting corporate culprits
A new book by a law professor who serves as president of the Center for Progressive Reform critically examines prosecutors' reluctance to take on corporate crime.
By Phil Mattera, Dirt Diggers Digest
On December 18th, the national page of the New York Times contained two stories on atypical events in the business world. One was headlined "Pharmacy Executives Face Murder Charges in Meningitis Deaths" and the other "Chemical Company Owners Are Charged in Spill That Tainted West Virginia Water."
By all rights, articles like these should be as common as those reporting on the prosecution of warring gang members or drug kingpins. Actually, they should be more common, since street crime is declining while corporate malfeasance seems to be on the rise.
The reasons for the reluctant prosecution of corporate crime are carefully dissected in the new book Why Not Jail? Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction by Rena Steinzor, a law professor at the University of Maryland.
Steinzor, who is also president of the Center for Progressive Reform, starts by pointing a finger at what she calls "hollow government," by which she means "outmoded and weak legal authority, funding shortfalls that prevent the effective implementation of regulatory requirements, and the relentless bashing of the civil service."
What makes the decline of health, safety and environmental regulation so troubling is that for quite a while the system was, Steinzor notes, working fairly well. Both the food and drug laws of the early 20th Century and the environmental and workplace health legislation of the 1970s were helping to reduce deaths and illnesses.
Yet by the beginning of the new century, regulatory agencies were becoming timid while industry opponents and their Congressional allies grew ever more aggressive and successful. Steinzor takes the Obama Administration to task for often putting politics above regulatory rigor and for allowing the OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs to continue its traditional practice of weakening proposed rules.
Steinzor also excoriates the Justice Department for its widespread use of deferred prosecution agreements and non-prosecution agreements, both before and during the Obama Administration. She sees these techniques as exactly the wrong approach in addressing corporate culpability in situations such as the Massey Energy mine collapse and two disasters -- the Macondo well blowout and Texas City refinery explosion -- linked to BP.
Rather than letting corporations buy their way out of these situations with financial settlements and promises not to sin again, Steinzor shows how it is possible to basic use legal concepts such as recklessness and willful blindness to bring criminal prosecutions against culpable managers and executives, especially when "industrial activities cause grave harm to public health, consumer or worker safety, or the environment."
This needs to be done not only at the federal level, but also by local prosecutors, who have the powerful but largely neglected weapon of state manslaughter laws at their disposal.
Steinzor acknowledges that it will be difficult to change the attitudes of prosecutors, who all too often go for the easier approaches.
Another obstacle is the reluctance prosecutors seem to have about bringing cases they think might threaten the continued existence of a large corporation, a phobia stemming from the demise of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm in 2002 in the wake of its criminal conviction for actions relating to the Enron fraud.
It is significant that the two prosecutions cited at the start of these piece involve executives at relatively small firms. Until we also see executives at Fortune 500 companies facing the risk of time behind bars, the current corporate crime wave will continue unabated.
