And $5M in compensatory damages seems about right for 2 years of a successful small bakery
Why should I get 30 years for a crime that should be 5 years because they want to send a signal. Make it fair and make it equal.
Edit: Apparently this is a unpopular opinion. All I am calling for is that punishment meets the crime. Not meets the crime and exceeds it in order to prevent unrelated parties from committing the same crime. They aren't my responsibility.
I'd think that having your standard practice be to make sure it wasn't worth it would find the same amount as the threshhold for both deterring the current perpetrator and deterring others.
And I don't want my government prosecuting people and giving them high sentences just to deter other people. It's barbaric behavior.
Like cutting the hand off a thief so others know what will happen if they get caught stealing.
That's not how it works, it's about getting the accountants or lawyers or whoever to tell that person's boss "this can be expected to cost us $XXXX".
Deterrence is the whole point of punishing crime. Every society in human history has done this. It's not "barbaric," what's "barbaric" is allowing criminals to do horrible things to innocent people without any incentive against it.
That difference is not clear to me. What sort of deterrence to an individual would not also lead others to think that could happen to them as well if they were to commit a similar crime and get caught? - or, to consider the contrapositive, if it does not invoke that thought in others, why would the convicted be deterred from trying again? The fact that they were caught once does not mean they will be next time.
Furthermore, I dispute the idea that deterring people from committing a harmful act, before that harm is done, is not a justifiable goal for a society (note that this does not imply that I must therefore endorse the cutting off of thieves' hands.) Quite often, the perpetrator cannot compensate fully for the harm done, and it is always better if it were not done in the first place.
We should note that what is being deterred here is Oberlin's decision to fight the case rather than accept its obvious responsibility and compensate the plaintiffs for the damage it did. Personally, I think this is a net benefit to society, and if it makes entities in similar situations think twice, so much the better.
It seems like that you are suggesting that we could simply not punish people at all for first offense, as long as they can credibly promise that they won’t reoffend. After all, if they won’t reoffend, under what you say, there is no point in punishing them at all. Sure, this means that people will know that they can scot-free offend one time, and so many more will likely do, especially if the risk of being caught is relatively low, but you explicitly want to ignore that. This is crazy to me. No society ever worked like that.
Additionally, deterrence function is not “virtue signaling”, this is not what the term means.
Public prosecution is absolutely terrible way to deal with dealing out punishment. Not all individuals are the same, not all crimes are the same, but once you are given a guilty verdict judges are expected to give out sentencing guidelines that match similar tag lines/crimes regardless of circumstances.
Punishment should be more personalized and should be a performance improvement plan based on the individual and how they respond to the effective plan/action.
I really ask you to consider this from a moral standpoint.
Society isn't always right. Sometimes society just does things because it's easier, not because it's right.
Exactly right. I want to send a message to potential criminals. I think that it’s highly beneficial to sacrifice the well being of a criminal in order to prevent more people from being victimized by other criminals. I think preventing crime is a strong moral imperative, and this is significantly more important consideration than the rights of criminals. In fact, I think putting the latter above the right of the people to not be victimized is morally despicable. I hope that my position is clear.
You should not punish people to stop the future actions of unrelated people by giving certain ones bigger punishments than meets the crime.
Add a deterrence but only make the deterrence with the intention/scope of the individual who committed the crime.
Don't add a deterrence with the intention of stopping other unrelated parties. That is an unfair assessment of my individual crime and the harm that I caused.
That is an unequal punishment/consideration that shouldn't be included in the process.
If they were meant to deter others, they would be pegged to the size of other potential wrongdoers. But they are not. They are pegged to the size of the actual wrongdoer.
Have you heard of "treble damages"?
I think treble damages are easily within the realm of fitting the crime. And the full $30M before interest is less than 3x the $11.5M in combined bakery and legal losses.
Also, you have to factor in the chance of getting punished. If a parking meter had a fifty cent fine for not paying, nobody would ever pay.
That doesn't make a lot of sense. The whole point of the criminal-justice system is to attempt to deter criminal behavior. It's practically definitional.
Although the systems have often been merged in recent times, many places (including some parts of the US) had two entirely separate court systems: a "court of law" for the enforcement of laws by the government, and the imposition of punitive sanctions to discourage behaviors by making them unprofitable to engage in, and "courts of equity" wherein individuals could bring suits directly against each other and where the judges had broad discretion to impose various remedies (e.g. specific performance).
An example would be if your neighbor stole one of your cows: the government (often in the form of a sheriff or magistrate or similar) could decide to go after them in a court of law, because having people stealing each others' livestock is socially corrosive, hence why it's illegal. But you as the owner of the cow could petition a court of equity for relief, independently of the government's decision to pursue action in a court of law. The court of equity's remedy might basically be "give back the cow", or if they had already eaten the cow, maybe they'd tell them to give you an equivalent cow instead.
There are a few US states that still maintain these dual systems: Delaware is the most well-known one, and its Court of Chancery deals with lots of contract disputes and such between private parties. Tennessee and a few other states are similar.
AFAICT the existence of courts of law (or their equivalents) are almost universal features of complex civilizations and probably governments generally.
If there's no punishment for breaking the law, you don't have laws, merely polite suggestions.
One downside to retribution only is that the odds of being caught for a crime are less than 100%, so someone stands to gain more than they stand to lose by breaking the crime. For example if the punishment for tax perjury was commensurate with my ill gotten gains, I wouldn't have any reason outside of a personal moral framework not to lie. But if instead I can go to prison for 3 years, a good chance to save a fair chunk of money is much less attractive.