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Comment by jacknews | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately this kind of hit-and-run is quite common in Cambodia.

Sometimes there is genuinely no way to find the perp, but a lot of the time, either the police are cowed into not really investigating too hard (when the perp turns out to be the son of a highish ranking government official, or wealthy business family, for example), or there is this kind of attempt to make things go away by paying-off the victims, police and anyone else necessary.

I would guess (but you never know) Huawei itself may have little involvement, other than providing the salary required to drive such an ostentatious vehicle, etc, in what is still a poor, developing (though thoroughly corrupt) nation (http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f135/gavinmac/15181532_346...)

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Not saying that a hit and run would get the same treatment, but I've definitely seen underage DUIs and posession arrests "disappear" for the kids of wealthy locals right here in the USA.

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.

> there is this kind of attempt to make things go away by paying-off the victims, police and anyone else necessary

Am I wrong in feeling that there is nothing wrong in making things go away by paying the victims? (Not the police though.)

Especially with accidents that are from negligence without mens rea.

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.

>criminal issues are not open to market forces

That part irks me the most. He's driving drunk, injured 3 people. After running away paid some compensation, which in Cambodia is likely to be small change. No further action required as far as police are concerned.

It's disgusting. Compensation should be part of criminal proceedings rather than void them

It's a sad state of affairs. Cambodians are wonderful people, but the corruption and inequality is all pervasive.

Thats why some states will scale the punitive measures to the wealth of the individual. $5000 might be terrible for you and I, but maybe that scales to $50M for a billionaire?

Small change by Western (or "Huawei boss") standards, but potentially a large amount of money by local standards -- this is a country where the average income per year is under $1000.

But the issue is that, even if this compensation is judged fair (and there's not a whole lot of incentive for the perp to be fair...), without the criminal charge there's effectively no deterrent against this happening again.

Incidentally, in Finland most fines (including speeding fines) are computed as units of income. So a millionaire is still incentivized not to speed, because they might get hit with a $100k fine: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1759791.stm

I've always been intrigued by how Finland handles this. I always had the impression there were probably "clever" ways to avoid this, by for example simply reducing income and increasing equity in the company they work for, etc.

How precisely does Finland avoid the loop holes, if they do?

There is another issue with this. When potential compensation is high, people start faking accidents to extort the compensation from drivers/insurance companies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqaig0nVcDs

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?

So require that the actual victim has to be satisfied with the payment, with measures to make sure they haven't been intimidated.

You can come hit my car with yours in exchange for a big pile of money. It may not be the purest form of justice but if everyone's life is improved in the interaction then that's pretty good.

> So require that the actual victim has to be satisfied with the payment

Great! Hunt and kill people with no families, so there can be no victims or anyone left to grieve for the corpse.

In case it wasn't obvious: my snark goes to 11.

....because rich people have a hobby of killing people. And in a drunk driving incident, they'll quickly make a call to their secretary to confirm which guy has a family and who hasn't so that he can aim for the one who doesn't.

I am so confused. That is the opposite of what I suggested.

When the actual victim is dead, then they cannot be satisfied, so you go to prison. That part is easy.

> Is a kid worth less than a working parent?

This is an interesting question Angus Deaton talks about in "The Great Escape"

So a baby knows hardly any one but has their life ahead of them.

Where as a old person has less years but their death effects more people.

Once you get into a working ability, it depends on their job and qualifications.

It's not an easy question to answer.

But I'd say a young working parent is worth more than a kid.

Worth a read: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...

http://www.snopes.com/chinese-drivers-kill-pedestrians/

This is an actual, real job for actuaries and lawyers in insurance companies, and legislators which write civil codes.

Examples:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/weekinreview/09marsh.html

http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1808049,0...

http://www.bolingriceatlanta.com/ultimate-guide-to-wrongful-...

https://www.millerandzois.com/maryland-wrongful-death-settle...

Interestingly, in the last link:

The average fatal accident or malpractice claim for an adult man is $4.1 million ($1.4 million median); for an adult woman, it is $3.1 million ($1.4 million median)

The average verdict for a minor male is $4.3 million ($2 million median); for minor girls the average is $3.4 million ($1.5 million median). No, we can't explain the difference.

The average verdict for deaths over 65 is $1.3 million.

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.

Everyone rich enough should be able to murder one person without jail time? Is that a world you want to live in?

You should decide on compensation or jail time in a will, not your family or government.

I believe there is a difference between murder and manslaughter without intent. Negligence crime can possibly be compensated. Intentional murder should never have that option.

> The victim's family successfully argued against jail time so the doctor could continue practicing and have the money to pay a settlement.

How did this work? This seems to be a criminal case and the state is the one which brings charges so you can not settle. Also, IIRC - there are fixed punishments once you are found guilty in the US.

I wonder if part of the deal was house-arrest for the surgeon. Lots of (usually lesser) crimes these days are being punished with house arrest to save money because prisons are so expensive (and also do absolutely nothing to rehabilitate people, in fact quite the opposite). Forcing the surgeon to have house arrest (which includes being able to go to work, but not much else), and still go to work to pay for a big-ass settlement, is still punishment.

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.

Punishment is probably the worng word.

In developed countries, people don't get punished, but shown how they were wrong and how they could do better in the future.

If you're just able to buy you out of evey crime you do, you learn nothing.

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.

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