Public Interest, White-Collar Crime

A CEO Was Actually Sentenced To Prison Time

It's exceedingly rare, but sometimes corporate conduct is so egregious that an executive actually gets put behind bars.

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handcuff handcuffs businessman crime white collar criminalWe all know that Bernie Sanders wants Wall Street executives to be prosecuted for their role in bringing about the so-called Great Recession of the 2000s. But it should come as no surprise that, when pressed on this position by the editorial board of the New York Daily News, Sanders couldn’t identify a legal basis for bringing such a prosecution. After all, the whole point of corporations is to insulate individuals from responsibility for their actions.

So — even though corporations are people, my friends — it’s rare that high-level corporate people do jail time in relation to any corporate malfeasance that stems from these people’s decision-making. Of course, when corporations break the law and cause serious harm, there’s a public interest in seeing justice done. And sometimes for justice to be done, it requires the rich and powerful to do time. It’s therefore worth highlighting those rare instances when that public interest is served.

Those of you in Appalachia probably already know where this is going: last week, former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship was sentenced to a year in prison (the maximum under his statute of conviction) for willfully violating mine-safety regulations.

Many have acknowledged the significance of Blankenship’s conviction and sentence, while also suggesting that Blankenship’s sentence is too light. And, in light of the circumstances that spawned his prosecution, it undoubtedly is too light. A summary of these circumstances from the Washington Post:

Blankenship was cited 835 times in the 28 months leading up to the worst coal mine disaster in 40 years, in which a combustible mixture of coal dust and methane ignited, killing 29 men working 1,200 feet below ground. The explosion was a direct result of safety violations at the mine, according to a 2011 report by the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Its findings were corroborated by two independent investigations.

Twenty-nine deaths? Utterly horrific. And 835 citations in just over two years? Yikes. The violations of mine-safety regulations certainly seem clear enough. The only real question must have been whether these violations were willful.

Perhaps the sheer number of citations alone would have been enough to establish willfulness. But Blankenship’s blunt memos to his employees likely eliminated any doubt there. In 2005, he dictated this memo:

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If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e. – build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever), you need to ignore them and run coal. This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that coal pays the bills.

And in 2008 he dictated this memo:

All of you engineers think that planning for ventilation in the year of 2015 is more important than survival of today, and believe me it’s not. You need to get low on UBB #1 and #2 and run some coal. We’ll worry about ventilation or other issues at an appropriate time. Now is not the time.

Now, I’m no mine expert, but both these memos seem to suggest that Massey’s engineers should stop worrying so goddamn much about big-government b.s. like ventilation and instead just run some goddamn coal. And that seems pretty goddamn willful to me.

Dig into the evidence here and there’s even more ugliness. Which, I think, makes this the flip side of last week’s column.

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Recall that last week I wrote about the Department of Justice’s efforts to put an end to abusive bail practices that result in jail time for poor people who haven’t been convicted of any crime, aren’t dangerous, and aren’t flight risks. Specifically, I noted the Supreme Court’s 1956 declaration in Griffin v. Illinois that “there can be no equal justice where the kind of trial a man gets depends on the amount of money he has.”

Well, here there’s no question that Blankenship has an obscene amount of money. But he nevertheless got the kind of trial that results in a conviction and jail time. And, while that might not be equal justice, precisely, it is at least justice.

Sam Wright is a dyed-in-the-wool, bleeding-heart public interest lawyer who has spent his career exclusively in nonprofits and government. If you have ideas, questions, kudos, or complaints about his column or public interest law in general, send him an email at PublicInterestATL@gmail.com.

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