Huawei Boss Crashes; News Stories Disappear

Yeah, it's more a matter of degree than nature.

There is something called "probation before judgment". Get a traffic ticket, show up in court looking sufficiently repentant, and the judge will give you a pass on points if you don't get another ticket for six months. I benefited from this in high school, and I have heard of it being used for minor criminal offenses.

In any case, for anything but felonies grievous enough to get you tried as an adult, your juvenile record is supposed to be sealed when you turn 21.

I'm not a lawyer. My view is that you should be able to pay to solve civil issues (my dog pooped on your lawn, etc). But criminal issues are not open to market forces -particularly such an unequal market as Cambodia.

Great idea. Let's take away any remaining thing that rich people can potentially be held accountable for!

What's the ante for a dead person? Is a kid worth less than a working parent?

This happens in the states (sometimes). There was a famous case of a surgeon in Florida who killed someone while driving. The victim's family successfully argued against jail time so the doctor could continue practicing and have the money to pay a settlement.

Putting him in jail won't fix anything; paying restitution is a better outcome. The key is that you shouldn't be able to avoid criminal penalties if you repeat the crime. The "Get out of jail for a fee" card should only be available once.

In Europe (and probably US) both drunk driving and running from the scene of accident are prosecuted by the state. In most countries accidents resulting in bodily harm also requires Police intervention and investigation.

Anything less is a sure sign of corrupted third world shithole.

This would, in practice, give different civil rights to people based on wealth, so I'd say it's definitely very wrong.

At least, this would be very wrong from a strictly idealized western perspective; I can imagine in a poor society there could be some degree of covert systemic tolerance (this is a wild guess).

> Am I wrong in feeling that there is nothing wrong in making things go away by paying the victims?

I can be very wrong, whenever it's a conspiracy to defraud and endanger the rest of society. A dangerous driver (or any other reckless or malicious actor) not only evades the "correct" punishment, but they are often still the same risk to everybody else in the future. Bribing the witnesses doesn't erase that.

A simplistic example would be a billionaire rapist who pays a victim for silence, and later rapes a second victim. Doesn't the first victim bear some kind of responsibility for helping the criminal evade justice and harm another?

As others in the thread have pointed out, "civil versus criminal" is often used as a distinction because it correlates to whether the transgression is "everybody else's business" or not.

That is the core difference between something civil and criminal. In a criminal offense, a state brings in charges for the overall benefit of the society. You are basically asking a question on what makes a criminal offense. There are very clearly defined norms including violation of fundamental human rights which makes something criminal or civil. Killing someone, could be as clear case that something could be criminal.

There's certainly nothing wrong in principal with the interested parties "sorting it out amongst themselves" - it happens with minor accidents every day in probably every country in the world. I'm even pretty much OK with paying off the media to remove the reports or not report it in the first place. They're only interested because of who he is, and it's not related to his job, so I don't see a big problem here.

As you suggest, the problem is when the authorities are also susceptible to being paid off. As the innocent party, my choice should be "accept your offer to settle, or contact the police and my insurer." When the choice is "accept your offer to settle, or get nothing because the police are already paid off", then I don't have any negotiating power. We have no idea whether the settlement was remotely adequate for the damage that was done, or whether the victims felt like they had to take a token payment because the alternative was nothing at all.

There's something wrong in making things go away by going away from the victims, when they possibly need help, without even stopping.

That's a complicated question because it intersects with a bunch of philosophical questions:

* Can the victims of a crime be made whole by compensation?

* If a crime harms people at random, is the crime only against those harmed or against all those placed at risk? Or society as a whole?

* How should the justice system balance the relative priorities of making the victims whole against deterring offences that haven't yet happened and reducing recidivism?

* To what extent do criminals take a rational economic view of crime? Should punishments and compensation be scaled relative to prosecution rates?

* Is it just for victim payoffs to depend on BATNA, if it means a poor, powerless person's life is worth less than a rich, powerful person's?

* Can a payoff ever be just if the justice system, which is the victim's only alternative, isn't just?

* Should we accept a less economically efficient response to crime if doing so removes perverse incentives?

A thing I haven't seen mentioned is that there are two thresholds of compensation.

There's the amount you pay them so that they'll stop prosecuting. Having been hurt, they'd rather take the money than pursue justice, but it would have been better not to get hurt in the first place.

Then there's the amount you pay them so that they consider themselves lucky that you accidentally ran into them and then gave them a lot of money to shut up. They may no longer have a leg, but the boatloads of cash more than make up for it.

The second amount is a lot more defensible, but it's probably also a lot higher.

I'm not too familiar with the US justice system, but I do not think it is like either of these. In the Belgium case, there is no plea as it will be as if the case never happened. Nothing goes on your record afterwards. Unlike a settlement, in the Belgium case this can occur after trial and sentencing. You just buy of your sentence, and everything is erased. There are limitations as to the types of sentences to which this can apply (I think 2 years imprisonment was the max.), but it was a grey area often skirted. The law is now on hold as of this summer after being in operation since 2012, but politicians think it can be 'rescued' with some more clarifications and some more transparency.

No, this is not like a plea bargain. A plea bargain is where you decide on a lesser sentence for pleading guilty, not going to trial. Here, you can trade your sentence for money. This is completely outrageous!

Unless your blood alcohol content is up above the legal limit, in which case it doesn't matter whether he suicidally jumped in front of your car...