Seems excessive to me. 7 years is more than many violent offenders get. Way more than necessary to make the point.
Edit: 60 in the US, many more globally.
[0] http://news.mit.edu/2015/volkswagen-emissions-cheat-cause-60...
Imagine what humanity could be capable of achieving with just a small increase in morality in the executive class. The problem in the world is not capitalism, as so many think, but corruption. Saying you are doing one thing, but actually doing something else.
That's probably true but that point seems to be used as a jab to sell newspapers, at the very least it's inflammatory. Meanwhile, two-stroke engines, older diesel engines, airplanes using leaded avgas may be as bad as the ten million slightly off tune VWs. And I say this as a person with a parent very ill with lung disease COPD and IPF.
I'm not saying the exec deserves to go free but seven years is excessive. Even manslaughter (in my country) gets you two years which means you go to prison, in the US I think that's called a felony.
But these aren't illegal.
The point about the deaths is "it was specifically illegal and they did it anyway, with these quantifiable consequences".
It’s the same logical trade off of speed limits and cars in general, raising the speed limit costs lives but if it saves more man hours worth of lives than lives it costs it’s worth it.
[...] plead guilty to felony charges of illegally importing nearly 600,000 vehicles equipped with devices to circumvent emissions standards [...]
It satisfies the need revenge I guess.
(It doesn't have to be jail time: it could involve expanding public transit, or promoting urbanism over suburbanism, or introducing congestion charges, or regulating car ownership heavily, or lowering speed limits, or lots of other things.)
And then following that I say "also I'll sell my driving services to hundreds of thousands but lie to them about how I get them to work, because if they knew I was driving they'd balk because they don't want blood on their hands"
And then following that I say "also I'll invest in complex technology to hide my car from the police so that I will never be caught"
With those minor modifications your scenario is a totally reasonable analogy.
Perhaps this is a silly way to look at things.
Personally I have the option to ride a bike and electric (nuclear+hydro) trains instead of driving a car, so that's what I do.
But that's just my opinion
But yes, sentences should be far shorter across the board.
Really? You'd say that cheating on emissions standards is worse than say beating someone over the head with a bat and robbing them?
Not to mention willfully flouting the law. They need to set a precedent.
[1]http://news.mit.edu/2017/volkswagen-emissions-premature-deat...
If someone has the power to poison a whole nation, with that power comes equal responsibility for their actions. If they act in good faith, we tend to forgive their mistakes, even if they have disastrous consequences. But there's no good faith here. We know he intended to poison them.
There is no serious ethical justification for considering a mugging to be worse. None has been presented here. We just naturally 'feel' that when the powerful commit crimes, these are mistakes (they are not). When the weak commit crimes, they need to be put in their place, because the weak and poor breaking the law is abhorrent to our neoliberal ideology -- the rich are supposed to assault the poor, this is just how things are. The opposite is unthinkable.
exec fraud, such as insider trading, is much harder to punish and the sentences more lenient relative to the $ taken