Obama’s Justice Department Likes Criminally Prosecuting People, But Not Corporations

Fewer than one in eight federal agency criminal referrals of corporations led to actual criminal prosecutions between fiscal years 2010 and 2014, according to Justice Department data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

Source

Full Report: Link

If you can pay to play, there are no losers! For the individual, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Go directly TO JAIL.

While criminal referrals of individuals resulted in prosecutions at an 82.1 percent clip, corporate prosecutions from referrals only happened at a 12.3 percent rate.

This particular report studies over 1 million criminal referrals issued over a five year period by 146 agencies throughout the federal government. Building off of a previous TRAC analysis from 2004, the report shows a 29% drop in corporate criminal prosecutions up to 2014.

While the individual is held accountable, the current administration doesn't feel that corporations should be held to the same standard. All referral outcomes are decided by a federal prosecutor at one of 93 (now 94), U.S. attorney offices across the country. After reading this article, they are more or less criminals themselves.

The list of enablers: Link

The amount of individual referrals compared to the amount of corporate referrals is understandable considering that a group of individuals can represent themselves as one corporate entity. This ensures a lack of responsibility when facing criminal charges as an internal investigation must take place in order to buy time or find a scapegoat.

Some 999,670 of those referrals involved individuals, while only 10,670 referred corporations to the U.S. attorney for possible criminal prosecution. Over 820,000 of the individual criminal referrals were converted into actual prosecutions, compared to just 1,309 of the corporate referrals.

The divide amongst prosecution rates is quite interesting. Offices in North Dakota, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Wyoming prosecuted over 40% of corporate referrals while the “sheriff of Wall Street” located in the southern district of New York only prosecuted 11 of 179 criminal cases, or about 6%. Even worse was the office in New Jersey, receiving 707 referrals but only prosecuting 32 or about 4.5%.

The middle district of Alabama, the western district of Michigan and the northern district of Oklahoma prosecuted a staggering ZERO corporate cases. To be fair, the article does not give the exact number of referrals received by those offices so the percentage could be quite low compared to other offices. With that said, its about quality, not quantity.

Corporate crimes most commonly prosecuted after referrals include environmental and immigration offenses, from agencies like the Department of the Interior, Environmental Protection Agency, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Of the 5,000 referrals on white-collar crime, only 371 turned into prosecutions. One hundred and eighty-seven civil rights complaints against corporations only led to one prosecution over the five-year period.

Roughly one-third of the corporate criminal referrals came from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with the Department of Health and Human Services, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Internal Revenue Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Postal Inspection Service also making significant referrals.

The TRAC report further describes how many referrals were made by each agency and the prosecutions made by each attorney's office across the country. It hopes to bring awareness to available public records so that the public can “be better informed about the thousands of important decisions made each day by federal prosecutors, federal agencies, and occasionally the attorneys general.”

I was going to add that prosecution does not imply causation, but we all know the deal. In fact, the justice department has been previously criticized for “pursuing deferred prosecution or non-prosecution agreements” with corporations, often waiving or excusing a company's criminal negligence in exchange for a fine and/or independent monitoring.

Neither of these options provide any real accountability once the damage is done and further prove that you and I are living under a separate rule of law. I'll leave you with this little gem from Justice Department official Sally Yates,

“Fighting corporate fraud and other misconduct is a top priority.”

In other words...

Hope and Change, baby!

Welcome to pretty much every administration that came before Obama as well.

originally posted by: 3NL1GHT3N3D1
Welcome to pretty much every administration that came before Obama as well.

The us govt needs to be prosecuted and the new revolution will take place

$&@? Obama And the hand up his ass

The 1% ers know no laws....and its their corporations ......not ours....

a reply to: eisegesis

Well...

If anyone is surprised by this, that would be rather unfortunate, and appalling.

It is likely that this white collar crime that barely gets investigated, let alone prosecuted over, is responsible for an awful lot of economic woes, oft attributed to bunk ideas like poor folk being a bigger drain than corporate fraud against government, and by extension the people. But it's ok. Fraud of a scale which borders on treason is done by RICH folk, and they are the right people. Best leave them to their own devices and genius money making schemes, for the good of the nation....

Strap them to a gurney and push them over a waterfall, for goodness sake!