Corporate personhood, for better and worse, makes it harder to charge individual employees with a crime unless you have really specific evidence for their particular involvement.
On one hand, this is good, because it’s much easier to prove “This business clearly fucked up” than “This individual was definitely involved in this fuckup” that trials of individuals go through. Separately, but non-negligibly, it also provides for a much greater insulation of economic and social competition; some guy pursuing a legal vendetta will not sink a company when the founder goes to jail for an unrelated matter, and nor will an investor whose only involvement was liking the funny acronym and buying stocks be charged with murder for the negligence of some fuckwit boss.
On the other hand, it’s bad because it encourages bad actors to use corporate personhood as a shield. As corporations have no sense of self-preservation, running a corporation into the ground - either by dismantling it or intentionally running dangerous shit like this - has very few downsides to its investors/controllers, so long as they do so intentionally and with a mind to profit from it.
I was a chemical process safety specialist once, not in the US. The Hazards Analysis team has, in that jurisdiction, criminal responsibility of identifying reasonable risks according to industry best practice. Someone with executive power is appointed within the company to bear criminal responsibility for executing the HA recommendations in a timely manner, usually a site manager.
So let’s say a toxic release happens and people have to be hospitalized and there’s death to river fauna and flora. The company bears financial and civil responsibility for it. But the people in the HA team and the company executive bear criminal responsibility.
I actually worked under a site manager that had to answer a criminal case for a pollution incident. The the people were acquitted (and rightfully so, there was no negligence nor malice), and the company had to pay environmental recovery and a fine.
You can bet that manager was on top of all safety and environmental studies on that site.
Corporate personhood, for better and worse, makes it harder to charge individual employees with a crime unless you have really specific evidence for their particular involvement.
On one hand, this is good, because it’s much easier to prove “This business clearly fucked up” than “This individual was definitely involved in this fuckup” that trials of individuals go through. Separately, but non-negligibly, it also provides for a much greater insulation of economic and social competition; some guy pursuing a legal vendetta will not sink a company when the founder goes to jail for an unrelated matter, and nor will an investor whose only involvement was liking the funny acronym and buying stocks be charged with murder for the negligence of some fuckwit boss.
On the other hand, it’s bad because it encourages bad actors to use corporate personhood as a shield. As corporations have no sense of self-preservation, running a corporation into the ground - either by dismantling it or intentionally running dangerous shit like this - has very few downsides to its investors/controllers, so long as they do so intentionally and with a mind to profit from it.
I was a chemical process safety specialist once, not in the US. The Hazards Analysis team has, in that jurisdiction, criminal responsibility of identifying reasonable risks according to industry best practice. Someone with executive power is appointed within the company to bear criminal responsibility for executing the HA recommendations in a timely manner, usually a site manager.
So let’s say a toxic release happens and people have to be hospitalized and there’s death to river fauna and flora. The company bears financial and civil responsibility for it. But the people in the HA team and the company executive bear criminal responsibility.
I actually worked under a site manager that had to answer a criminal case for a pollution incident. The the people were acquitted (and rightfully so, there was no negligence nor malice), and the company had to pay environmental recovery and a fine.
You can bet that manager was on top of all safety and environmental studies on that site.