I would love to see more inanimate objects plead guilty to felonies – not just companies.
BP’s guilty plea, accepted by a judge on Tuesday, is just a start. Click here to read more about it. The company is a convicted criminal. Its top executives are not.
Clearly, justice does not go far enough. Why not charge the oil rig, itself, for blowing up? Why not file a criminal complaint against the water for letting oil get in it? And to take it a step further, to slightly more sentient objects, what about those fish? Why did they have to swim into the oil like that?
The legal doctrine of charging things – like corporations – should be expanded to rocks and trees as well. Plenty of rocks and trees that ended up in the way of drunk drivers were complacent in those crimes.
“Whiskey bottles, and brand new cars. Oak tree you’re in my way.” That’s how Lynyrd Skynyrd put it oh so many years ago. Why has nothing been done?
I love justice. Don’t you? Especially when only things are involved in the crimes.
Anne Smith
TanMan
January 29, 2013
There is a kind of sublime madness to all this, like children hiding under a blanket pretending to be invisible. Executives hiding behind the facade of a corporation and the courts acting as though they are not there. Well, peek-a-boo, I see you!