There’s your problem right there: “Negotiations”.
I think I want to be a white, white collar criminal when I grow up, so that I too can negotiate away the consequences for my misdeeds.
Everyone else just goes to prison, guilty or sometimes, not.
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You’ll never make it as a white collar criminal with an attitude like that: ‘misdeeds’ suggests that you didn’t reach a negotiated settlement without admission of wrongdoing!
Those are some of the real jewels of the ‘high justice’ system: arrangements where a vaguely trial-like process occurs, and a (feeble) penalty is enacted; but nobody ruins the Seriousness of the occasion by asking why a penalty is being paid if no wrongdoing is being admitted; or why somebody on the hook for a nontrival penalty is being permitted to claim that they’ve done nothing wrong; but are just giving the feds some money in the context of a DoJ proceeding because, um, mumble, mumble.
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Someone needs to do some good reporting from inside this process. Surely it’s public, or most of it anyway. I wonder if Matt Taibbi has done that…
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I like your optimism.
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If this is like the settlements with other defendants, they’re also getting credit for not pursuing deficiency judgements for borrowers. even in states that don’t permit them. And since most of the borrowers don’t have a pot to piss in, getting “credit” for forgiving debts that are uncollectable is basically free money.
Hilary will fix all this!!!
Wow, I’d love to be able to negotiate the terms of my criminal conviction. Must be nice to be more than human.
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Your spell checker is terrible.
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I rely on the retroactive model 
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If DOJ takes a serious interest in you, probably you will be able to negotiate and no, you won’t love it.
Well, Cameron, because drone strikes are expensive and inefficient for the kind of pogrom you long for.
Instead of pining for drones or assassin guilds to deliver you telegenic gratification, perhaps reflect on practicalities of rolling up your own sleeves and murdering someone’s kin. If it still excites you then, seek help.
I see former Bayern Munich president Uli Hoeness was released earlier this year after serving half of his 3.5 year prison term for evading EUR 3.5m 18.5 m 28.5 m in taxes (he’d only been staying there overnight for the past year anyway).
Among a population composed largely of mammals, how exactly are you supposed to run a justice system if you have to let everyone with biological relatives off? That’s all of them.
This doesn’t mean that execution is necessarily the best policy for all white collar criminals; but you aren’t going to get much of anything done if you allow people’s relatives to count as de-facto hostages when deciding on their sentences.
Let’s not mix justice into this. I was addressing Connor’s murder advocacy, not justice.
It’s begging the question pretty hard to presumptively exclude the use of lethal force from ‘justice’ and then claim that I’m mixing justice into the matter.
You don’t have to agree that it is correctly included; and you can definitely argue that it shouldn’t be included in a given case; but it’s badly fallacious to just silently define something as out of scope for ‘justice’ without so much as a nod to why; and then advance an argument that hinges on that exclusion.
Back up a second.
The Department of, you know, Justice of a country well regarded for said practice finds fit to extract some money form a company instead of taking it to court. The settlement, by the way, explicitly doesn’t absolve criminal or individual liability.
You may take issue with that (as I do) and debate the arrangement and institutions that brought it about. If a citizen, you may shape the institutions towards different outcomes.
How we leap from here to debating lethal force leaves me disoriented.
I think that we might be suffering from some degree of…axiom divergence… here; well before we get to the killing people part.
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I think you’re right. Which systems of justice do you hold in higher regard, how have they dealt with analogous cases and what kind of society have they begotten?
The justice systems in place across most of the rest of the developed world, that don’t execute the mentally impaired, don’t try children as adults, don’t disenfranchise ex-felons, don’t use prisoners as private corporate slave labour and don’t kidnap, imprison and torture people for years without trial?
Those ones.
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Fair, and where do those ones stand on executing bankers?
Remember, it’s the supposed inefficacy of the US DOJ and consequent calls to murder on Boingboing BBS that I take exception to.
