“ALBANY, Ga. — A former peanut company executive was sentenced Monday to 28 years in prison for his role in a deadly salmonella outbreak, the stiffest punishment ever handed out to a producer in a foodborne illness case.”
A related question is whether you think the government should collect and spend more of our tax dollars to regulate the food industry or it should deregulate and let business/industry regulate themselves Ditto for other industry, e.g., banking/finance (e.g., the Wall Street), health and life insurance, pension funds, etc.
He said ‘ship it’ when told that salmonella tainted PB was behind schedule resulting in 9 deaths? Something like that? And you are asking if that should just be up them to regulate self? Am I understanding the question? Or because he didn’t put the spoon in the mouth maybe it should be a misdemeanor? Yes I think this level of gross negligence for public safety deserves stiff sentence, if I have the story right as I didn’t read about it carefully, this seemed a very active and callous action where death was a predictable outcome.
Considering 9 people died and many more became seriously ill because he presided over a deliberate coverup of the samonella contamination of the peanut butter, he does deserve the 28 year sentence. In being convicted, he was found to have deliberately known about the contamination and yet, fabricated false certificates stating the contaminated peanut butter lab results were clean when they weren’t and played a leading role in covering up the contamination.
Considering business/industry has had a poor history of self-regulation…especially if one reads past instances of effective industry self-regulation in the late 19th and early 20th century in accounts such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, I’d rather have more tax dollars spent on regulating the food industry. Especially considering one reason why this sad case came about is due to the fact the budget for food and drug inspectors has been cut so severely ovr the last 3 decades that there’s nowhere near enough inspectors to even do a cursory sampling of a tiny fraction of food production facilities which are within their regulatory domain.
I don’t know the case or what his role was, but if the CEO specifically knew there was a salmonella contamination, and did nothing to try to stop or mitigate the problem, then perhaps. I guess we have to think about the rehabilitation value of that. It’s not like this guy is a thug out there shooting 9 people. This is more akin to white collar crime motivated by greed, where he was a step removed from the deaths. I don’t think he’ll be more rehabilitated after 28 years than after 2 or 3 years. But the long sentences make self-regulation stronger. Maybe next time a CEO faces this situation, they’ll act differently than they would have otherwise.
I’m not convinced that we can parse killings that are motivated by greed and put them in some cleaner, more sanitized category than those motivated by passion or revenge or anything else. It is instructional to see that “it’s not like this guy is a thug . . . it’s white collar crime” rationale out in the open, shall we say, in a nutshell like that.
9 people are dead, the decision on sentencing needs to take this into consideration. I am not the lawyer, so my “thinking” has very little meaning. All I know that the contaminated food was knowingly shipped and it resulted in 9 deaths.
Good business is self regulated. Government regulation just creates more government bureaucracy, if business is not honest, they will find the way to cheat anyway (vw - anybody?).
One wrong doing is not a reason to dismiss another wrong doing and more so in completely different industries. And again, are we lawyers, what our opinion means? Nothing!
Hey, I’m a lawyer, and I say that if this guy knowingly allowed tainted peanut butter to be shipped, then he deserves a harsh sentence. If I’m the judge, I’m going to say that this is worse than the garden-variety crime of passion–this is a calculated decision to endanger people’s lives for money.
There are plenty of other people who should be in jail, but aren’t. I don’t find that terribly relevant to the question of whether this guy should be in jail.
