Let’s talk about murder. The criminal laws distinguish between various degrees of murder. The victim is always dead; that part doesn’t change. The murderer’s punishment is based on the murderer’s thoughts and intentions leading up to the death he caused.
Lesser penalties for murder are imposed if you didn’t mean to kill someone. You pull up to a stoplight and notice a muscle car in the lane next to you. You rev your engine and grin. The driver of the muscle car does the same. Challenge accepted. The light turns green. You both floor it. And kill the person in the crosswalk who hadn’t quite made it across the street. The law classifies this as manslaughter or negligent homicide. You should have known your behavior was dangerous. You didn’t mean to kill someone, but you should have known that flooring the gas pedal through an intersection was risky. It was bad luck there was someone in the crosswalk.
More serious penalties for murder are imposed if the murder was intentional. If you kill someone on impulse, that’s typically a second degree murder. Road rage, for example, where a driver shoots someone who cut him off in traffic. He didn’t plan it out ahead of time, but he aimed a deadly weapon at a person and pulled the trigger.
The most heavily penalized murder is premeditated. The murderer knows someone will die. He has time to think about it and make plans. Society agrees that this is the worst type of murder, deserving of the harshest punishment.
One of the most morally bankrupt murders is a premeditated murder committed for money, committed by someone who is already rich.
Purdue Pharma and the Sackler Family
I’m betting most of us have watched at least one docu-drama about the Sackler family, who used to own Purdue Pharma, and their role in the opioid crisis. The short version is that the Sacklers developed a painkiller, oxycontin, that was highly addictive. The Sacklers orchestrated a full court press marketing effort complete with a cute sales force and the outright lie that oxycontin wasn’t addictive. When information started piling up about oxycontin being addictive, the Sacklers started moving billions out of Purdue Pharma and into personal accounts, while continuing the aggressive marketing. This went on for several more years before Purdue Pharma started getting sued for lying about the addictive properties of oxycontin.
Purdue Pharma filed bankruptcy to stop all the lawsuits. The idea was that Purdue and the Sacklers would throw a lot of money into a fund, and that money would be used to pay out claims to victims and their families. The Sacklers were going to contribute something like $6 billion dollars to the fund. To be clear, the Sacklers took about $10 billion out of the company before it filed bankruptcy. They offered to give back part of it, but they’ll still be billionaires. They’ll still live in the lap of luxury.
The bankruptcy didn’t work out the way the Sacklers wanted it to, and they’re facing new lawsuits now. But still. None of the Sacklers are facing jail time. None of the Sacklers are guilty of committing murder. Purdue Pharma, the company, pled guilty to a couple of criminal charges for paying kickbacks and violating the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. The penalty was paying fines.
Did the Sacklers, the individuals who ran the company, commit premeditated murder for money?
Boeing
Airplane manufacturer Boeing has been cutting corners on safety features, leading to fatal crashes and mid-air emergencies. The fatal Boeing crashes in October 2018 and March 2019 killed 346 people in total. Boeing employees are speaking out as whistleblowers. This article describes how Boeing went from an engineering-focused company to one focused on profits at the expense of quality.
Boeing is in trouble. That means it will have to pay some fines, and its reputation is suffering. No one is going to jail. Even though airplanes crashed and killed people because the individuals in charge of the company said, “stop wasting time and money on all those safety measures.”
Did the Boeing executives, the individuals who decided to focus on profits over safety, commit premeditated murder for money?
Crime is a Social Construct
Crime is a social construct. We, collectively, write laws about what is and isn’t a crime. Taking a gun into a convenience store and shooting the cashier because he won’t give you all the cash in the drawer is a crime. The person who did it will go to jail. Administering poison to your spouse is a crime. The person who did it will go to jail.
But if a CEO creates a Rube Goldberg contraption that separates himself from the people who die as a result of his company, those long, drawn-out murders are not crimes [fn 1]. Richard Sackler committed premeditated murder. He knew that oxycontin was going to kill people. He didn’t know exactly who, or how many people would die, but he knew oxycontin was addictive and would kill some of the people who took it. Even as the news stories piled up about opioid addiction, overdose deaths, suicides, the collateral damage of the lives ruined by oxycontin addiction, Richard Sackler never committed murder as defined in the law of any state.
Long-distance murder by corporate policy is not a crime.
Thousands of people have died due to prescription opioids. If Richard Sackler had set off a bomb in Times Square on New Years Eve and killed 5,000 people, he would go to jail. But Richard Sackler’s oxycontin has killed more than 5,000 people, and Richard Sackler is a billionaire who will never face jail time. He separated himself from the victim by both time and space.
Boeing executives should have known that saving money on safety features and quality control would eventually make their product (airplanes) less safe. An unsafe airplane is extremely risky. Yet they chose increased profits. Essentially, they condemned an unknown number of future people to death in order to make more money. The individuals who made these decisions separated themselves from the victims by both time and space.
Boeing executives and the Sackler family committed premeditated murder for money. Despite already being rich, they killed people for the sake of more money.
Why? Because our laws don’t make long-distance, drawn-out murder a crime. Crime is a social construct and our society does not criminalize risking peoples’ lives for profits.
Now, if you’ve thought of a ridiculous situation in which the customer has a freak accident and dies in a way that no one could have anticipated, please be assured that isn’t what I’m talking about. Honest mistakes, unforeseeable events, things like that may cause a death but that isn’t the type of death I’m talking about in this post.
There is plenty of evidence that the Sackler family knew their product was killing some people. There is plenty of evidence that engineers at Boeing told their new executives that skimping on safety features and inspections would lead to planes crashing or falling apart mid-air.
Killing people is becoming just another cost of doing business. If a business causes a death, they just pay out and keep doing what they’re doing. If it gets bad enough, they’ll make some changes, but in the meantime, they continue raking in profits.
The Corporate Death Penalty
Some countries actually do apply the death penalty to corporations. Not the individuals running them, but there is a penalty called “judicial dissolution” in some countries that revokes a company’s charter. Imagine a situation in which a judge could order Boeing to put the engineers back in charge and prioritize safety over increasing profits. Or a situation in which a company is broken up and sold off to new owners.
The United States would have to write a whole new chapter of the criminal laws to make this a thing. Legislators would have to create a structure and a standard under which the leadership of a company could be judged to be so corrupt that the entire company gets the ax. Right now, there isn’t any way to make that happen.
Questions:
What do you think? Should the individuals who lead companies that prioritize profits over peoples’ lives be tried for murder? How much evidence should there be that the CEO knew that deaths were inevitable?
What sort of penalty would deter companies from knowingly risking the lives of their customers or employees?
Do you think free market capitalism can correct this problem? If so, how exactly would you organize a boycott of Boeing? Or second-guess your doctor who is assuring you that a painkiller isn’t addictive?
Do you think the government should criminalize “death for profits” behavior?
Should long-distance murder for the sake of profits be a crime that results in jail time?
Should a company with a culture of murder be broken up and sold to new owners?
[fn 1] Disciple made a comment to this effect in Hawkgrrrl’s Immunity post this week.
Wheat & Tares 
“Or second-guess your doctor who is assuring you that a painkiller isn’t addictive?”
I am fortunate enough to have enough real-time experience with 2nd guessing doctors. A key truth that I wrung from getting my business admin in healthcare management degree was “doctors literally don’t have time to” go in-depth with your medical history. At best, you can draw medical professionals’ attention to pertinent facts / avenues of research to prevent being “gate-kept” from some supports, services, medications etc.
Decent medical care requires a ton of executive functioning from the patient (from paperwork support / insurance coordination / diagnostic observations / patient narratives, etc.).
I may be a tad paranoid, but I “trust” that my doctor will screw something up / not be aware of something important, so I am the one who is likely to ask, “how do you know that this isn’t addictive?” of my doctor. I usually walk into doctor’s appointments with 1 initial treatment plan, 2-3 factors to keep an eye on (including future tests to be run), and an idea of what “devil’s advocate” concepts/groups to also consult with.
I also will come into the appointment with an agenda, with a detailed list of observations, and at least an idea of what tests have been run for that condition.
Medical staff either love me or hate me pretty much at first visit. I do have an old-school GP, but we have a decent working relationship because he knows I will be walking in with an agenda and he respects that.
Killing to get gain? Yes, it should be criminalized as the worst form of mass murder. These crimes are one of the few that IMO opinion serve life imprisonment or even the death penalty. The weird part of all this is that LDS conspiracy theorists are busy spreading bizarre conspiracy theories which barely fit the LDS scriptural model and are factually insupportable and unfalsifiable,. But these theories are accepted because they are often aimed at liberals and “godless” left-wingers. Meanwhile, back here in reality there are “secret combinations” and “Master Mahans” that fit the LDS scriptural models exactly, but they are never pointed at in a religious setting because these examples are capitalists and opposing capitalism is socialism and socialism is bad. If you don’t believe me, just ask one of those right-wing zealots in your ward.
Amy,
As the mother of children with serious medical needs I have become very very good at what you are describing. When I had a conflict with my bishop my husband and I went to counseling with a psychologist who was also a former SP. He explained that because I was a mother of kids with serious medical needs I had grown used to confronting authority when necessary to take care of my kid’s needs. He explained this automatically makes bishops uncomfortable because they are used to women that defer to their authority, and I clearly put my children in front of any authority (still do).
It does take a lot of assertiveness, energy, executive function, perseverance and language skills to get what you need out of medical providers.
Whether it’s Purdue Pharma or Theranos or Boeing or the LDS not filing its 13F’s, they are not dummies. They all made a calculated choice, which was that any bad press would be short lived, any punishment would be significantly less than the gains, and therefore their dishonesty was worth every penny. That’s how the system works. As asked above, how do we fix this? I really don’t know how, but I believe we can if we prioritize it over things like book banning and criminalizing in vitro.
With respect to doctors, I used to look at them the way I looked ay my faith community’s prophets and gave them too much credit. As I’ve aged, I’ve learned that nobody knows my body like I do, nobody will advocate for me like I do, and so I’ve learned to ask doctors to please stop talking and listen to me, to please explain what all these medications are for, and to please for the love of God do not waste my time and money ruling out medical issues I don’t have. And they defer to me. It’s been eye-opening.
The big case of this sort in the UK at the moment is the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, government inquiry ongoing. Lots of failures, from those who certified the external cladding met the relevant fire safety standards, property owners who disregarded safety concerns of residents, and so on and so on, with money at the bottom of it all. And still people elsewhere are living in unsafe flats with similar cladding which has yet to be removed, and made safe, amid arguments about who is paying, who is responsible for taking remedial action…
We have a Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act, but there is some feeling that it is nevertheless very difficult to get convictions.
Chadwick is correct about “calculated choice”. In a slightly different, but related context, I teach The Big Short to my students, and after we watch the film, we talk about the enormous consequences of financial malfeasance (3 million foreclosures, e.g.) and how a relatively small number of clever, calculating people made a staggering amount of money because of the miserable circumstances of millions of people. It’s essentially the same idea as the Sackler family, but with more people and more large systems involved (banks, credit rating agencies, mortgage underwriters, and so on) and fewer deaths, although maybe not, as Brad Pitt’s character points out that, a significant number of deaths result for each percentage point of increased unemployment.
One of the things we discuss is how massive numbers of victims actually makes it, ironically, more difficult to assign blame to specific people, since, as the OP and other commenters point out, the blame is spread over a large number of people and corporate entities. Which is why Chadwick’s point about calculated choice is so chilling; somewhere along the line, a number of people comprising part of one or several entities made the cold, ruthless choice that profit/gain was more important than human life. Which leads me to some of your questions. Yes, I absolutely believe this behavior should be criminalized and that it should result both in significant jail time and the dissolution of the entities in question. The only way to hurt amoral rich people is to take away the instruments/corporations that make them money.
Of course, as Chadwick also points out, the cold calculations of these corporations is built in. To return to the Big Short for just a moment, say that all of the banks involved were really allowed to fail without government bailouts. Part of the “too big to fail” argument was that letting all of these banks fail would have resulted in even more innocent people being hurt/dying. The fact is that large, corrupt systems are very good at creating dependence on them (not unlike, say, a drug known to be extremely addictive) which is another way of saying that they are very good at infiltrating the lives of innocent people in numerous ways, which is a really insidious but effective way of ensuring that people will continue to need whatever the system/entity supplies. That’s why it’s so hard to either enact laws that ensure accountability or to fundamentally alter a culture in such a way that it no longer needs what certain entities supply. And considering the Mormon nature of this blog, it’s easy to see how this is also the case for the church. If a religious institution manufactures a belief system that people think they really need, it’s extremely difficult to alter or diminish that institution’s influence once it has taken hold of people.
Do not forget to impose a death penalty on our government for their mishandling of the COVID crisis. At least a million Americans have died from COVID. Japan’s mortality is 10% of the USA on equal population basis. The difference? Japan chose a vetted epidemiologist to head their effort, not an ancient research scientist. Trump chose Fauci, and Biden didn’t get rid of him.
Japan didn’t impose lockdowns and masks. Their strategy relied on social distancing (the 3C’s – avoid crowds, close contact and closed spaces). They also closed their borders to foreign disease vectors. The only US state remotely close to the Japanese strategy was Hawaii.
>
No free market capitalism will not solve problems for the general populace. Capitalism needs to be controlled, have limits placed around it, and be required to pay its fair share of tax. Big international companies rarely pay tax.
I would nominate the republican point of view. Wherever it appears.
It has policies designed to kill people. During the covid it undermined the health officials, and refused to implement policy that worked elsewhere. So as thhq says above millions more died than necessary.
Universal healthcare would save millions of lives too. That life expectancy is 5 years more in countries with well funded healthcare than in America. I was recently in hospital for a week and then had rehab for another 2 weeks, some in my own home. It cost me nothing. One of the medications I was on cost $1100/ bottle.
Republicans claim they are anti abortion and the number of abortions has been falling for 30 years, but that downward trend reversed under Trump, and his right wing supreme court. https://www.guttmacher.org/article/2022/06/long-term-decline-us-abortions-reverses-showing-rising-need-abortion-supreme-court
Republicans also have a global gag order, which resulted in 2 million extra abortions, most not performed by doctors, and with thousands of maternal deaths.
They are also less likely to regulate business so it is more morally accountable.
thhq…
your comment is staggering in its ignorance.
Japan didn’t need to impose masks because there was already a culture of mask wearing amongst the general population for even minor infections. Good quality masks of different sizes, including those suitable for children, were and remain readily available for purchase by the general population. There was no mad scramble for masks, or initial downplaying their importance for fear medics might run out of them. The Japanese population definitely wore masks.
The paranoia about corporate malfeasance here is thick. Yet posters turn their heads away from our government’s COVID fiasco. I blame our politicians, regardless of party. They imposed an inferior pandemic strategy
Trust me, my complaints about the pandemic response are a mile long. That being said, pretty much all of us in the US had no prior experience with pandemics. As such, I tend to be a bit more sympathetic to how it played out.
Contrast that to the long list of repeat corporate malfeasance and I’m just not willing to give the same charity. It’s not paranoia. It’s my lived experience. Boeing admitted they were required to make safety and quality checks and they chose not to. YMMV.
Iâm not the least bit sympathetic Chadwick. Hereâs the vetted epidemiologist Japan used. Trump chose a talking head. His approach was not updated from Spanish Flu
Sorry to be posting by e ma
thhq – you’re off topic. Off topic comments are considered spam. This thread is about corporate wrong-doing. We’re not discussing government responses to covid. Future posts on that topic will be deleted.
Brother Sky brought up the “too big to fail” problem. That definitely needs to be addressed. The Big Short (great book, by the way, I highly recommend it) described how the financial systems imploded in 2008. It was an industry-wide pattern of behavior, a spiral of greed and idiocy. It caused so much suffering, yet the people who made the decisions that brought down pillars of the financial industry didn’t go to jail. I hope they lost their fortunes, but I don’t even know if that happened.
“Too big to fail” is a problem in a system that is consolidating into monopolies. No company should get so big that it is too big to fail. Banks and tech need to be broken up so market pressures can allow them to fail if they screw up their management.
The Big Short type shenanigans are a little off-target from this post, though they definitely have the same vibes. It is hard to assess accountability on just a few people in that situation. The whole financial industry pitched in to create the 2008 meltdown.
Product liability issues, like oxycontin and Boeing airplanes, are not attributable to an entire industry. In these situations, a specific person is responsible. Board members vote on what policies to pursue, and those votes are recorded in the minutes. We could find out which Purdue Pharma board members voted to market a pill without warning people about addiction. We know which Boeing CEOs read the reports about safety concerns and chose to disregard them. “Product liability” is a well-defined area of the law. People can sue if someone’s product hurts them and get money if they win their case. I believe that extending product liability to criminal penalties for the specific individuals who made decisions <em> knowing their products would kill someone at some point </em> is something the legal system could realistically do.
I’m looking at a deterrent effect here. If CEOs know they face jail time, not just fines paid by the company, for making products that are destined to kill someone, I hope that would deter them from making those decisions.
The problem with holding company executive responsible is that the companies are so big and own and control so much. They donate to multi millions to political campaigns and other perks to (mostly Republican) politicians so that the company always get the votes for laws they want or defeat laws they don’t want. Our government is pretty much owned and controlled by the huge companies. The big businessmen even take Clarence Scumbag Thomas on expensive vacations and pay for relatives schooling and other bribes, so even the SCOTUS is run by big companies. So, we can’t even keep laws for clean air and drinkable water, how on earth could such a corrupt government ever pass laws to send these very rich corporate executives to prison?
My husband was 20 years with the Air Force, then worked Civil Service and had a lot of dealings with Boeing. Boy did he have things to say about Boeing. He would catch them in our right fraud and report it and the report would just get buried, and of course Congress was not willing to hold Boeing accountable for shoddy merchandise, missed deadlines, broken promises, and so on. Congress was the only power that could hold Boeing accountable, but just ignored all the problems and they just kept right on giving their military contracts to Boeing.
The government of Australia has introduced a law that no one can contribute more than $1000 to a politician or political party. And that these donations must published immediately. The hope is to make political influence less possible, by business or wealthy individuals.
Perhaps it would work in America too?
Geoff
Campaign contributions have tight limits here too and are publicly available. It seems to have made things worse since these laws were passed in McCain’s time.
https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate-taking-receipts/contribution-limits/
I read this post a couple of days ago and had strong thoughts, but not enough time to comment. But I want to do so now. I reject the premise that the Boeing or Purdue (Sackler) family actions are tantamount to murder. Harmful as these these extremely troubling and negligent corporate actions are, I think it is irresponsible to compare them to a bomb going off in Times Square, negligent street racing, or even cold-blooded murder as road rage. Furthermore, you haven’t really attempted to quantify the social benefit of air travel or pain relief.
I have treated a lot of patients in the ER and in the med-surg floor, many of them in chronic and acute pain. Some of them are med-seeking or “frequent fliers”, and that is tragic. Any treatment, medication, and intervention has a host of risks and benefits. It is absolutely imperative to ask to what degree harms were concealed, downplayed, or outright ignored at the expense of profits and hold those responsible. But we still need to remember that in our economy, pain analgesia and transportation via flight is a valid and critically important social goods. Were these medications abused? Yes, most certainly. A lot of this depends on what was known, what was concealed, and the intent. It’s notable that these medications are still in use (more tightly controlled) and are alleviating enormous amounts of pain from surgery and medical procedures today.
In the original post, you rightly mention intent as being paramount when we discuss killing/murder. The intent of pain medication is not to kill, but to relieve suffering. The intent of building an airplane is to facilitate rapid travel, human connection, and commerce. If we fail to see the obvious difference between someone holding up a cashier at gun-point and then shooting him with downplaying the risks of a medication prescribed for a valid purpose will lead to a debilitating addiction spiral then I think we have lost the plot.
I will leave it to the courts, lawyers, and lawmakers to sort out and impose the appropriate financial penalty and craft more effective regulations to mitigate the social harms. I am not arguing against legal/financial accountability or reform for the Boeing or the Sacklers. What I am suggesting is that we need to be a bit more critical in comparisons between murder and corporate malfeasance/negligence. We need to think long and hard about what the 2nd order effects will be at supressing innovation and detering intelligent men and women from developing new products and technologies that have a societal cost/benefit trade-off.