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"Death penalty for white-collar criminals?"

By Douglas A. Berman

The title of this post is the title of this newspaper commentary, which is an (unsurprising?) response to the Madoff mess.  Here are snippets: We rationalize capital punishment by claiming that the fear of death is an excellent deterrent and a fitting punishment for cases of extreme harm to an individual (murder) or a community (sex offenders).  Rarely has the fear of the death penalty deterred a single crime of passion or the flawed anti-social criminal.  To be a deterrent, potential criminals need time to weigh the crime against the penalty and some level of native intelligence to understand that death by lethal injection or the electric chair is very likely if they commit the crime. Ethical and religious considerations aside, perhaps the death penalty should not be reserved only for violent physical crime but as punishment for extreme economic harm, to white-collar crime such as embezzlement, fraud, or the conspiracies of silence that made so many accessories to Madoff?s Ponzi scheme, and the corporate collapses that have cost us nearly a trillion dollars so far...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on January 08, 2009 (boomark / email).