Hacker News Reader

Comment by ppod | Hacker News Reader

In what other facet of human life would you be held responsible for something you had no knowledge of?

Try telling your accountant "I want to pay less tax and I don't care how you do it."

When you're audited, have fun claiming you didn't know that you were committing tax evasion.

Try buying something for a ridiculously low price down the pub. When the police come to take the stolen goods away, try claiming you didn't realise something selling for a tenth of its value was stolen.

Typically ignorance of the law is not an excuse when found disobeying it, and there are more laws than any reasonable person can know.

TO both x3n0ph3n3 and mkaziz:

Knowledge of the act, not knowledge of the law. There are very few contexts in which you can be punished for not knowing an illegal act took place, and they are all situations where you should have known but were negligent.

negligence casts a very wide remit, but applies mostly to professionals (ie, credentialed staff). general executives are granted considerable leeway with respect to negligence in many context it would appear through things like the 'business judgement rule', where bein incompetent is a legitimate excuse and not presumtive negligence. INAL but just throwing this out there for discussion to see some other sides of the issue.

There is the fiduciary duty aspect in play here. If a the employee of a business does something criminal while conduction the companies business, then it's possible that the owners are victims as well. However if they willfully created incentives and benefited from said criminal actions, it's hard to how they are not perpetrators themselves.

In warfare. A commander can be criminally liable for failing to prevent criminal actions by their subordinates. Most famously, Tomoyuki Yamashita. Or from the prosecution brief during Ernest Medina's trial:

>'When troops commit massacres and atrocities against the civilian population of occupied territory or against prisoners of war, the responsibility may rest not only with the actual perpetrators but also with the commander. Such a responsibility arises directly when the acts in question have been committed in pursuance of an order of the commander concerned. The commander is also responsible if he has actual knowledge, or should have knowledge, through reports received by h'un or through other means, that troops or other persons subject to his control are about to commit or have committed a war crime and he fails to take the necessary and reasonable steps to insure compliance with the law of war or to punish violators thereof.'

As a parent, you can be held liable for crimes that your children commit.

The Selective Service frequently reminds me that ignorance of the law is no excuse to break the law.

As mentioned above, this case involves ignorance of the action, not ignorance of the law.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com