The US justice divide: why crime and punishment in Wall Street and Ferguson are so differentMatt Taibbi was the scourge of finance who called Goldmach Sachs a 'vampire squid'. Curious about the law's leniency on fraudsters, he began to investigate how so many Americans do end up in jail – and what he learned blew him awayI thought perhaps Thorfourwinds and a few of you might be interested in this article from The Guardian. While black Americans serve life for shoplifting 3 times, big finance fraudsters get away with it.
QuoteI'd spent years chronicling the ingenious crimes of scale that characterised the financial crisis era. These ranged from the mass frauds of the US sub-prime mortgage meltdown to the fraud-and bribery-induced bankruptcy of Jefferson County, Alabama to multitrillion-dollar market manipulation cases like the Libor scandal, so well known to British readers (but less well known to American ones).
The punchline to all these stories in the US was and is always the same. No matter how great the crime or how much money was stolen, none of the Wall Street principals is ever indicted or, for that matter, punished at all.
Even in the most abject and horrific cases – such as the scandal surrounding HSBC, which admitted to laundering more than $800m for central and South American drug cartels – no individual ever has to do a day in jail or pay so much as a cent in fines.
Whole story here (http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/17/us-justice-divide-crime-punishment-wall-street-ferguson)
Whaaat? Special treatment? I don't see any special treatment?
QuoteSkilling gets 24 years (http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/23/news/newsmakers/skilling_sentence/)
Ex-Enron CEO sentenced for his role in the grand-daddy of corporate frauds.
See? Financial people don't get speci......errrr....
Former Enron CEO Skilling's sentence cut to 14 years (http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/21/us-enron-skilling-idUSBRE95K12520130621)
Oh... nvm... Hard to even suggest we have a blind lady justice anymore, isn't it? The blindfold is still there. You just can't see the micro-transceiver in her ear for helping to see the 'proper' path. (sigh) Even a legitimate jury verdict to a valid sentence is no assurance .... for some folks. (fat chance we'd get off a parking ticket, let alone a 1/4 century prison sentence)