Discussion for article #240842
“It’s just been a seven-year nightmare for me and my family,” Parnell told a courtroom filled with families of children who survived violent illnesses and elderly adults who died after eating his company’s peanut butter.
Good.
Members of Parnell’s family pleaded for leniency. His mother, Zelda Parnell, told the judge both of her sons “have suffered for years.”
Good.
“They lost their income, all their material things and worst of all their pride,” she said.
Good and fuck you, people lost their lives due to their greed.
5 Likes
What a bunch of hateful scum bags. I wish he had gotten the 803 sentence.
2 Likes
This is why we need regulations that are strongly enforced. And why Libertarianism will never work. There are way too many people like this and we need protection from them. The free market can’t stop this guy. You need the government to make and enforce a set of rules to provide that protection.
7 Likes
Excellent news.
1 Like
“You got chocolate on my poison!”
“You got poison on my chocolate!”
4 Likes
As Kevin Drum pointed out yesterday, it is a virtual statistical certainty that the excess pollutants spewed as a result of VW’s emissions test detection and cheating software killed people. The necessarily large number of people involve in that fraud deserve the same treatment. If all that happens as a result of that scam is lawsuits and fines, it’ll be a crime.
Our inability as a species to devise an economic system that doesn’t reward people for being or acting like sociopaths is disturbing on multiple levels.
5 Likes
“They lost their income, all their material things and worst of all their pride,” she said.
She bemoans the loss of their pride? Are you freakin’ kidding me? Now we have an inkling as to how those sociopaths became sociopaths.
3 Likes
WTF is wrong with some people . . . .
1 Like
Parnell and two co-defendants also sentenced Monday were never charged with any deaths or for making people ill. Instead, they were charged with defrauding corporate customers such as Kellogg’s, which turned the company’s peanuts and peanut butter into finished products.
That made me ill, but at least the killer is going to spend a long time in jail. Also:
Defense attorneys said they plan to appeal both the sentences and convictions.
Tom Bondurant, one of Stewart Parnell’s attorneys, said 28 years would amount to a life sentence for his client.
“If you compare it with other food-safety criminal cases, it’s tremendously out of line,” Bondurant said.
Go ahead, asshole, fight the fraud charges. The prosecutor can resume work on a case dealing with the deaths and illnesses your client caused when he put “huge $$$$$” over the lives of people.
1 Like
And any commentary on the VW case would serve us well by noting that the same malignancies behind the criminal action at VW are far more prevalent, and far more dangerous, in the financial industries. Financial firms caused 1000s of times as much harm as VW has caused. People in financial firms collected huge amounts of income by making very risky investing and lending decisions and then using fraud and deceit to pass that risk onto others without accurate disclosure. Those who earned huge bonuses were never liable for any financial losses that resulted or for any of the harm that people suffered when they lost homes, lost jobs, suffered large cuts in government services, and so on. Greed and disregard for other people were minimum qualifications for those big-bonus positions in financial firms, not an aberration.
The difference is that the Big Finance people spent the two decades after the S&L crisis devising new forms of fraud and deceit that didn’t violate the letter of existing law, thwarting the adoption laws and rules forbidding the novel forms of fraud and deceit they were devising, and changing the law to make old forms of fraud and deceit legal once again.
VW just said “fuck the law!” and flat out committed fraud on its customers, engaged in a widespread campaign of false advertising to the detriment of its competitors and engaged in openly criminal violations of the Clean Air Act. The VW guys weren’t working any any kind of a gray area where the complexity of their actions meshed with legal uncertainty to generate ostensible reality. They just flat out broke the law.
Like the Financial Crisis of 2008, however, back of all of this, I suspect we will discover a compensation plan that created perverse incentives . . .
1 Like
Right? Apparently the best way to get a corporate crook punished for killing people in the name of a quick buck is to make sure he screwed over another corporation in the process. Sure a couple people died, but the real crime is that he might have cost one of his corporate buyers some money.
1 Like