Please read this abstract of the article, then click below for the full thing:
Recent financial scandals and the relative paucity of criminal prosecutions inresponse suggest a new reality in the criminal law system: some wrongful actors appear above the law and immune from criminal prosecution. As such, the criminal prosecutorial system affirms much of the wrongdoing giving rise to the crisis. Thisleaves the same elites undisturbed at the apex of the financial sector, and creates perverseincentives for any successors. Further, this undermines the legitimacy of the rule of lawand encourages even more lawlessness among the entire population. These considerationstranscend deterrence as well as retribution as a traditional basis for criminal punishment.Affirmance is far more costly and dangerous with respect to the crimes of powerful elitesthat control large organizations than can be accounted for under traditional nations of deterrence. Few limits are placed on a prosecutor’s discretionary decision about whom to prosecute, and many factors against prosecution are available, especially in resource-intensive white collar crime prosecutions. This article asserts that prosecutors should notexercise that discretion without considering its potential affirmance of crime.
There was a lady who was sentenced to 10 years to prison for her first offense of selling a small dime bag of marijuana.
If you steal loaf of bread, you go to jail, if you steal a pension fund you go to Washington DC.
The legal word for this institutional behavior is CONDONATION. Condonation means:
Definition for condonation:
a pardon by treating the offender as if the offense had not occurred.
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
This is an ancient principle in Anglo-American jurisprudence. Sadly, if the writer had used the word CONDONATION in her title, many lawyers would not have understood what she was writing about. How sad that the ancient concept of condonation had to be called “criminal affirmance.” We have more lawyers than any other nation; yet our lawyers are not well-educated in the foundational concepts of our legal system, including the equitable remedy of foreclosure which requires the foreclosing party to come to the court of equity with clean hands. Foreclosures have been, through ignorance, converted to actions at law where there is no defense to the most miniscule default by the homeowners, if all the legal requirements have been met–and the fraudsters don’t even bother to meet those requirements.
“Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it” George Santayana (1863-1952) Spanish philosopher, who lived through WWI and WWII.