That's an accurate description of the status quo. Just look at Volkswagen. Paid a couple billion in fines, couple of lower level managers serve a little bit of jail time, and the company is back to profitable as if nothing had happened - even though the deaths of thousands of people can be directly attributed to the scandal (per https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/emissionen-die-toerichte-...). The shareholders didn't suffer a dent.
It's similar with banks - when you owe a bank a million $, you have a problem. When you owe a bank a hundred million $, the bank has a problem. The richer you are, the more you can get away with.
(however it's always going to be >$1000 or so, for obvious reasons, including of course in Germany and Scandinavian countries)
(by the way, I hate how tiring it is to see Europeans claim how "socially progressive" and protective of rights the EU governments supposedly are. You have more rights, as a suspect, in the US. Not less. The US, without any doubt, protects the rights of accused person FAR better than ANY European country. Just ask Julian Assange)
¹ Most likely, though nobody can say 100% for sure if it's just a fabrication in the end. But it does all seem rather suspicious.
Note the technique used by the European courts:
> On 20 August 2010, two women, a 26-year-old living in Enköping and a 31-year-old living in Stockholm,[6][7] jointly went to the Swedish police not seeking to bring charges against Assange but in order to track him down and persuade him to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases after their separate sexual encounters with him.[8] The police told them that they could not simply tell Assange to take a test, but that their statements would be passed to the prosecutor.[9] Later that day, the duty prosecutor ordered the arrest of Julian Assange on the suspicion of rape and molestation.
So it was the Swedish government, NOT the women, that came up, with very flimsy justification, with the rape charge.
And let's just ask it: if they do that at the request of a (very) far away government, lying about that fact, do you think this is the only time they do such a thing ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assange_v_Swedish_Prosecution_...
Since Assange’s entire excuse for his flight from justice is the fear that the whole Swedish and British process has been a pretext for being dragged to the US for an unfair trial, I don't think he'll back you.
Of course, he's also completely nuts. If the US wanted him from the UK, we'd just file charges and seek extradition directly rather than go through some Rube Goldberg Swedish rape charges to get him extradited to a country we have a less-closw relationship with than the UK.
Note: I am NOT suggesting we do this.
Apropos of anything else, no, it is not.
You end up with silly (IMHO) situations like someone getting a $290k fine in Switzerland for 85mph in a 50 zone.
6 months in jail for someone who can't afford a $1k bail is the other end of the scale though - surely it cost substantially more than that to keep him in there. I'm pretty certain in the UK we have charities that help people out in such situations, is there no equivalent provision in the US?
He's not punished "more", he's punished equitably. The ultimate goal is not to collect $100, it's for the offender to not reoffend.
Disposable income is an actual objective and important concept, and if you ignore it when handing out financial punishment it just stops being punishment at all for people sufficiently wealthy to not give a single flying fuck.
Having "put the work in to build a successful company" — or just inherited their wealth — should not make one immune to punishment, yet that's exactly what happens with unscaled fixed-amount fines.
> You end up with silly (IMHO) situations like someone getting a $290k fine in Switzerland for 85mph in a 50 zone.
There's nothing silly about it. If that's a $500 fine for somebody with an income of 7 figures, it's not a punishment at all and completely fail at its purpose of making the offender not reoffend: they could get such a fine every single day and live just fine while an offender on US minimum wage loses two weeks worth of work on a single fine.
If that is the ultimate goal, then fine equitable punishment would include fines targeting versus ability to pay.
However, if the system is simply seeking recompense for an action then it is unfair to place a higher fine on someone simply because they have more money.
For traffic offenses such as speeding, perhaps stopping re-offending is the goal since speeding always carries a higher risk accidentally harming someone else.
For a parking meter offense, I think the goal is simple recompense as if you had put in more money at the outset, you would not have been fined.
The two replies above mine in this thread are talking about speeding offenses, which is the thread of discussion that I am responding to.
I appreciate your trying to bring it back to the original posting, but your reply is a bit too deep within the thread to be effective.
No he's not; you simply can't punish people equitably by financial means. License penalty points, bans, sure, but you just can't equate fines against differing incomes when not all costs and opportunities are relative to income.
I don't agree the ultimate goal is to prevent reoffending either, it's surely to prevent offending, which it failed to do in this case amongst many others.
Also:
"The Testarossa driver was initially fined a little less than $90,000 by the local jurisdiction. That was raised to $145,000 by the next court after the driver claimed diplomatic immunity, saying he is diplomat from the Republic of Guinea-Bissau. That didn't sway the court, which boosted the fine to $290,000."
https://www.wired.com/2010/01/record-speeding-fine-dents-swi...
Because his income isn't anything to do with the offence.
I just think you cannot scale fines in relation to income/lifestyle/anything else financially. You can scale it, but you can't hit people with different incomes, assets, etc. in the same fashion, which ultimately smells of a bad system to me.
The points system seems sufficent to me for most driving offences, beyond costs. But community service, prison time, curfews, anything which is equivalent and not open to manipulation.
if the fine is "one week of income" and you don't want to lose a week then you won't speed
if a speeding ticket was 5 cents everyone would speed every day... and this is the status quo for the rich since the fine is to their income what five cents is to most others
so we fine people enough that it affects them in a proportionate way to make the likelihood of changing their behavior equal, rather than only changing the behavior of the poor
The goal of a speeding ticket is not to collect $50, it is to save lives by detering people from speeding..
It was once, maybe. I wonder how many people are actually turned from minor offenders into full criminals by the current law/jail system. To me it looks like the goal is to operate an artificial selection on the human species to encourage those who help the economy more. That is, legalized Eugenics.
It was for $200 in highschool and it stung.
If i got that same speeding ticket now, it would not sting nearly as much, and i would probably be over it by the time i went to work the next morning.
Or something like that, anyway. Alignment of petty individual goals usually makes more sense than grand conspiracies.
Of course. But I don't think we can sensibly, or ethically, charge him an amount that would. How much would deter him to the same degree? $1m probably wouldn't cut it either.
Instead, surely we should either accept that and charge everyone the same absolute amount or find other more equitable ways of deterring him. License points, driving bans, community service, prison time, anything that isn't just taking obscene amounts of money simply because the guy has worked smart and earns more.
It needs to sting for everyone, not just the poor.
Do you reject higher tax brackets for the wealthy under that same line of reasoning?
Surely wealth is an important factor in deciding what people owe to society
Getting off track here, but I'd rather there were as few tax rates as practical. Perhaps even one under a basic income system. Then the rate is upfront, clear and honest. Not a compounding system of stealth taxes.
Worth noting that wealth is not the same as income, but we tend to tax income rather than wealth, at least until death.
Having to rely on charities to fix problems in our justice system seems completely backwards to me. That's a workaround, not a solution.
And what if he then commits a much more serious offence?
I still think the whole concept is so flawed it's a farce.
If we are trying to use this socialist fine system, then that would necessarily result in shorter jail time for rich people because they are being “harmed” more proportionally.
These scaled punishments are absurd.
"time" is the unit of punishment, as it's more equal than wealth.
We agree that both a rich and poor person should serve the same time in prison for the same crime
Therefore, for a fine, both a rich and a poor person should pay the same fine relative to their earnings per unit of time. i.e., if the fine is $100 for someone making $15,000/year, it should be $100,000 for someone making $15,000,000/year
But what about someone making $150k a year with no assets vs. someone living in a $1.5m property with no job who made $15k last year on $150k of shares?
What about someone with $1.5m in shares who made a $15k loss on them last year? Do they get paid instead of fined?
If flushing toxic waste to a river always resulted in constant fine - for rich companies with big enough waste treatment bills it would be rational (cheaper) to do it and pay the fines.
This would make people equal in front of the law.
Why would being wealthy allow you to break the law more often with less consequences on your wellbeing? See the example of Harvey Weinstein in the article. The dude is rich, so he can get away with it. What do you think of that?
We rarely use financial bail conditions except in the most serious cases. Financial conditions are mainly used where a) there are grounds to believe that the defendant has substantial funds at their disposal and b) there are grounds to believe that the defendant has a significant risk of absconding. It's a likely option if you're accused of robbing a bank or running a major drug dealing operation, but it's far from the default option.
If you're bailed, there will be conditions attached to mitigate the particular risks in your case. You might be required to report to a police station every week or every day to confirm that you're complying with your bail requirements. You might be placed under curfew with an electronic tag. You might be forbidden from going to certain places or speaking to certain people. You might have to surrender your passport. You might be required to live in a bail hostel. The court has to demonstrate that those conditions are proportionate and necessary, and you have the right to appeal their decision.
In Finland, speeding fines are income based to make sure they sting enough to get the drivers to change their habits. It's a bit moot with Gates (he takes a car to a racetrack if he feels like speeding) but it sure would be a useful thing for areas with too many Beemer drivers.