Here's what limiting govt regulatory resources has done to the prosecution of corporate crime...
I realize I'm cheating a bit on the four paragraph limit, but it's really difficult to describe a complex problem/solution when it involves the corporate world. The following is the current govt solution to limited prosecutorial resources vs corporate deep pockets.
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Jenner & Block’s Barkow on Prosecutors in the Boardroom
By Editor Filed in News November 12th, 2012 @ 9:54 pm
Prosecutors in the boardroom.
Is that what we want?
Whether we want it or not, that’s what we’ve got.
Anthony Barkow is co-editor of a book by the title – Prosecutors in the Boardroom: Using Criminal Law to Regulate Corporate Conduct (NYU Press, 2011).
He’s a former federal prosecutor. And he’s now a partner at Jenner & Block in New York.
Barkow’s book raises the red flag about the rise of deferred and non prosecution agreements to settle corporate crime cases.
“The book is definitely critical of the practice,” Barkow told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “But in a lot of ways, the book raises and explores the practice without necessarily condemning it. It does put forward a policy blueprint of ways the practice could be improved. But it’s a practice that is here to stay.”
“You can argue the practice should just stop, but that’s not going to happen. Reformers need to accept as reality that this is the way it is and the way it is going to be.”
But prior to the Arthur Andersen case, in fact this wasn’t the practice. The practice was either indict, convict or drop the case. There was an immediate change.
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Without these agreements, we wouldn’t be seeing this level of enforcement?
“That is probably likely,” Barkow says. “These agreements allow the government to leverage its limited resources, to bring more cases, to threaten more actions, and reach more resolutions that it would absent these resolutions.”
“Just look at the Fraud Section of the Department of Justice and the number of deferred and non prosecution agreements it has entered into over the past five to eight years. There is no way that Section – which was really small four years ago – could have pursued that many prosecutions. The reason they were able to do it was that these were agreed to early on.”
“The securities unit in the Southern District of New York ranges from 15 to 25 people at any given time. But if it can enter into deferred and non prosecution agreements against a number of corporations, that probably takes less work than actually prosecuting one of those corporations all the way to trial.”
In the old days, you would prosecute and get the plea, or drop the case. You didn’t go to trial.
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more...
http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/jennerblockbarkow11122012/
= new reply since forum marked as read
