Richard McAdams on Corporate Prosecutions and the Book 'Too Big to Jail'

How Should Prosecutors Punish Corporate Criminals?

Brandon Garrett is a law professor and leading expert on the subject of wrongful conviction, best known for closely examining 250 cases of people exonerated by DNA evidence. Now he has released a book on corporate crime. The title, “Too Big to Jail,” might suggest that his topic is only financial crimes, especially those related to the 2008 crisis, but the book addresses all sorts of corporate crimes: fraud, antitrust, bribery, import/export restrictions, evasion of environmental and pharmaceutical regulations, etc.

As with his study of exonerations, Garrett offers a pioneering empirical investigation of corporate prosecutions. Knowledge in this area was so lacking that we did not know basic facts like the number of federal prosecutions of corporations, the average fine, or the number of deferred prosecution agreements (explained shortly). There is, in other words, “no official national corporate offender registry,” so Garrett created one, assembling an archive of more than 2,000 federal corporate convictions, mostly guilty pleas, and more than 300 federal deferred prosecution and non-prosecution agreements. To illuminate the “hidden world of corporate prosecutions,” he put this data on-line for public use, a commendable contribution to public discourse.

Read more at The New Rambler