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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

> > Sure but defendants are presumed innocent and burden of proof is on the prosecution.

> Criminal defendants, not civil.

Everyone hates presumption of innocence when they are on the plaintiff/accuser's side. But strangely enough, everyone clings to it when they're on the defendant/accused's side. It's almost like it's a universal principle!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human...

Make no mistake. Anyone who wants to erode presumption of innocence and due process is for the power of governments and money over the individual, unwittingly or not. (Strangely enough, almost everyone who tries such erosion does it in the same way, no matter if they're in a totalitarian state or in a democracy; it's all done in the name of "justice.")

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Personally, I dont believe businesses should be treated as people legally, though I understand some of the complexity involved and why this is currently, mostly the case.

Businesses are entities and should be treated significantly different since as abstract/artificial human constructs, they have no real notion of life, death, hardship, hunger, disease, etc. and are able to act accordingly based on these relaxed constraints whereas humans do need to deal with these aspects.

Any notion of these human concerns reflected in a business exist only due to businesses being composed of and controlled by humans. Business decisions don't have to and often don't reflect regular human concerns. That relaxed constraint allows them certain competitive advantages over humans.

Those competitive advantages are then exploited purely as a proxy for some arbitrarily privileged humans, allowing them to push their personal desires on the world with losses minimally effecting their primary human concerns.

That common proxy relationship use needs to have more accountability that leads back to the humans playing the business puppets, otherwise, the punishments are not nearly equivalent in impact on life of a business entity vs an individual.

So individuals should be afforded certain rights, but when they work together as a group, those rights should be taken away?

The entire concept of the corporation is to make it less likely the people involved will be imprisoned or directly take risk based on their mistakes. They willingly take the advantages that come with incorporation, they should lose something. As it stands, anyone in a corporation is a first-class citizen while everyone else is treated as lesser under the law.

A business as a legal fiction != a union of all of its members.

People don't realize that. A corporation is a standalone entity. And yes, there is nothing inconsistent about a business being held to a more strict standard of disclosure than an individual. I.e. You can plead the Fifth. A Corporation cannot. When a search warrant is issued for all documents of/relating to/pertaining to X created or transacted between dates Y and Z, you don't get to withhold them because it might seem to incriminate the company. That's the price of the corporate superpower of the corporation being able to die/fold/be punished and everyone else being able to go home unharmed except for needing to find a new job; possibly at a new company already established, funded and poised to buy out the assets of the old corporation that's being liquidated.

Corporations are not people in the Constitutional sense. You can't take the HOV lane just because you are carrying the Articles of Incorporation for your company. Check with a lawyer by all means, I'm not one, but I've read enough case law and other stuff to feel confident I've at least got this part right.

A group of people working together is a partnership. And those people have all the usual rights and liabilities that people have generally.

Larry and Sergei could have founded Google as an unlimited liability partnership, but they preferred to incorporate. So Google has to follow the rules that come with incorporation.

Incorporation was a free choice. There was an alternative. Nobody's rights are being infringed.

businesses aren't on trial. it's their owners / directors / responsible parties who are on trial, and those are 'private individuals' - they might be held accountable for their business or business practices, but the idea a business is on trial is silly. and now we know 'people' are actually on trial, it's more logical to say they should be treated as individuals....

> businesses aren't on trial. it's their owners / directors / responsible parties who are on trial, and those are 'private individuals'

While it's very rare that a company is on trial it does happen. Partially in rather prominent cases[1]

There is such a thing as a corporate death penalty.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen

(Totally unrelated, but I've added ">" to the start of your comment so it didn't get formatted as code and thus break the layout of the page. Not your fault - this is a bug of ours. Perhaps the most commonly complained about bug.)

Thanks Dan,

I'll try to adhere to it when quoting in the future.

It's just that I always thought that courier font looks so cool for quoting.

But at the end of the day it should be legible, without scrolling around.

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