Sen. Warren Calls for Imprisoning Executives Over Negligent Harm

Presidential candidate and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) wants to see more business people behind bars, and she ’s not fussy about how to make that happen. In aWashington Post op-ed last week she unveiled a new Corporate Executive Accountability Act, which in her words would expand “criminal liability to any corporate executive who negligently oversees a giant company causing severe harm to U.S. families.” She says she wants top executives to know that they can be (again in her own words) “hauled out in handcuffs for failing to reasonably oversee the companies they run.”Under longstanding legal protections in the Anglo-American legal system, before convicting you of most crimes prosecutors must ordinarily show that you hadmens rea, a guilty state of mind. Occasionally one or another law relaxes the standard of guilt to “willful blindness” or gross negligence. More rarely, as under a controversial doctrine in FDA law, courts have permitted convictions on a theory of what amounts to vicarious criminal liability, as of a drug executive whose underlings commit certain offenses even absent proof that the higher-up knew of, encouraged, or was willfully blind toward the offenses. I criticized that “responsible corporate officer” doctrine in the FDA setting in this space two years ago, as well as in the  chapter on white-collar prosecution in the Cato Handbook for Policymakers. Warren explicitly states that her proposal “builds on” it as the bas...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs