Michael Mukasy is not someone from whom you'd probably expect to hear cogent observations about justice. After all, he ran the federal Injustice Department as Attorney General from 2007-2009, and even implicitly acknowledges in his remarks below having been part of the problem, if not quite in so many words. Nevertheless, he made an important point in a July 2015 speech transcribed in the September issue of Imprimis, the conservative newsletter of Hillsdale College:
"Recently we hear a great deal about the prosecution of 'evildoing' corporations, but not so much about the prosecution of individuals who are the alleged evildoers. Why is that? To be specific, a lot of what we hear with respect to corporations is not about prosecutions at all -- it's about 'deferred-prosecution agreements' or 'non-prosecution agreements', agreements that extract enormous financial penalties.
"Other attorneys general, myself included, made such agreements. But the penalties that have been extracted over the past six years are unprecedented. They involve numbers in the billions, and are of a scale that makes it appear that the Justice [sic] Department is acting as a profit center for the government.
"Justice [sic] Department investigations begin by looking into claims, for example, of unlawful payments to foreign officials or of unsafe motor vehicles. Corporations often face disastrous collateral consequences simply from having charges brought against them, which is why they are often willing to admit to conduct that the government cannot prove, to pay enormous fines, and to accept the oversight of monitors. In return, the government agrees that no charges will be filed so long as the corporations remain on good behavior for some specified period of time. Charges are rarely brought against individuals, on the other hand, because individuals can be put in jail. When faced with this, people usually fight back -- and when they fight back, they frequently win.
"This process generates cynicism about the American justice system, as individuals go uncharged, billion-dollar penalties are assessed, and the ones who pay are not wrongdoers, but corporate shareholders and employees." [and consumers, he might have added!]
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))