Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/03/15/impunity-for-lethal-errors.html
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Remember this?
There were some death penalties…
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And in addition, the melamine-contaminated pet food and toothpaste imported from China around that time.
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Plea bargains are such a difficult thing to accept. If I had any confidence that someone higher-up would actually be tried and jailed for manslaughter as a result of their negligence, I might be okay with this. But just like the mortgage crises, the big fish never get fried.
I actually wonder if anyone’s done a study on the effectiveness of plea bargains vs going hardcore for criminal convictions. Seems like once a person has been convicted, they have 1) a lot more reason to share the blame and 2) a lot more at stake if they cooperate. Making plea deals after conviction and only after someone is brought to trial seems like a much better way to go, but I don’t know of any court system that works like that.
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I hope -for the utermost shame-slap to the face- that her community service can be something so unbelievably white; let’s see giving life-coaching sessions to ‘inner city’ teens maybe.
Or writing her memoir while sitting around in a starbucks.
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And she’d better use her best penmanship, too!
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That’s an interesting twist on things: give one privileged criminal a cushy deal in exchange for flipping on other, more privileged suspects, then don’t go after the latter!
What I always find rather baffling(in this case, as in a wide variety of others) is how safe doing this sort of thing is, despite the fact that Americans are rather well armed; and a bit twitchy on the trigger finger by the standards of the developed world.
Given all the petty bullshit that people get shot for; you’d think that “I helped seriously screw over thousands or more” would be the kind of thing that has you engaging bodyguards and living safehouse-to-safehouse for decades.
Instead, I can’t think of a single case. People occasionally shoot up their immediate supervisors or the like; but malfeasance on the “it’s not a tragedy, it’s a statistic” scale appears to be amazingly safe, even when you leave a rather large trail of people with relatively little left to lose and good reasons for not liking you much.
I just don’t understand how that works.
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Misdirection and distraction, usually.
Usually the people most at fault for any travesty have long since insulated themselves from direct fallout of their actions via layers of bureaucracy and lots of middlemen.
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We need a word for this 
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Any stories on the statistics of punishments along the lines of “300 hours of community service” ? It would be somewhat soothing if that entailed something unusually arduous, but I suppose it’s more like, “Ayoye, you’re doing that all wrong, just sit over there and I’ll do it,” or even “Eh, you’ve been here five minutes, we’ll count that as the hour.”
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Dear Flint,
Sorry I gave your entire generation of children permanent brain damage by poisoning their water and lying about it. I just want you to know how difficult it has been for me to write this letter, but clearly I’ve done my time for this crime.
Love,
Corrine
P.S. Please don’t respond to this address, I’ve moved to a town that doesn’t have poisoned water.
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Atrocity?
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Don’t worry folks, she’ll get a good slap on the wrist for that.
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So lead poisoning is a national problem. Likely has been for a few years. Lead poisoning lowers your IQ and makes you more aggressive and violent. Lately our nation has become more aggressive and we elected a moron. Fix the pipes.
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Sorry I killed and permanently damaged the health of your families and communities. My bad.
#WTF US Justice System!!!
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They should be sentenced to 5 years in Flint, drinking the water. The LD50 for Lead in water, for most fish, isn’t real high.
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