Who's Responsible, the Corporation or the Executive?

Corporations have one big advantage over people: not only do they have, thanks to Citizens United, the right of free speech, but: it's really hard to put a corporation in jail.

Many of us have wished for corporate jails (as opposed to for-profit jails run by corporations), to which we could have sent, for example, the banks that nearly destroyed our entire economy. Alas, those don't exist, and it's extremely rare that individual executives get charged.

So I was interested but not particularly surprised to read yesterday that, as a followup to the horrific Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill two years in which eleven workers died, BP had finally agreed to plead guilty to numerous criminal charges and to pay more than $4 billion in fines and penalties over the next five years (article by Clifford Krauss and John Schwartz in yesterday's New York Times, here).

But what really caught my eye is that the Justice Department filed criminal charges against three BP executives in connection with the spill.

According to the Times report,

The government charged the top BP officers aboard the drilling rig, Robert Kaluza and Donald Vidrine, with manslaughter in connection with each man who died, contending that the officials were negligent in supervising tests to seal the well. 

Prosecutors also charged David Rainey, BP’s former vice president for exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, with obstruction of Congress and making false statements for understating the rate at which oil was spilling from the well.

Those charged are denying any wrongdoing.

Me, I'd want to charge BP's CEO, but that's just me.

Ironically, today's news included a report of an explosion and fire aboard another Gulf oil rig (Associated Press report, in the New York Times, here).  Thankfully, the rig was not producing at the time and there are no reports of oil leaking. No one was believed killed in the fire, although several had been seriously injured. At the time of the report, the Coast Guard was still searching for two missing workers.