David Dayen at The Intercept writes—Obama’s Justice Department Likes Criminally Prosecuting People, But Not Corporations:
Fewer than one in eight federal agency criminal referrals of corporations led to actual criminal prosecutions between fiscal years 2010 and 2014, according to Justice Department data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University
While criminal referrals of individuals resulted in prosecutions at an 82.1 percent clip, corporate prosecutions from referrals only happened at a 12.3 percent rate. [...]
The report builds upon a previous TRAC analysis showing a 29 percent drop in corporate criminal prosecutions from 2004 to 2014, suggesting that corporate crime has become a lower priority in the Obama administration. [...]
This report studies over 1 million criminal referrals issued over a five-year period by 146 agencies throughout the federal government — from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Bureau of Mines.
These executive branch agencies cannot prosecute criminal cases themselves: They must funnel them to one of 93 U.S. attorney’s offices across the country. Then federal prosecutors at those offices make the decision to charge individuals or corporations.
Some 999,670 of those referrals involved individuals, while only 10,670 referred corporations to the U.S. attorney for possible criminal prosecution. Over 820,000 of the individual criminal referrals were converted into actual prosecutions, compared to just 1,309 of the corporate referrals.
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