What happens if a corporate person gets sentenced to prison? I recently saw the quote “I will recognize corporations as people the day the state of Texas puts one to death.&quot;, and this got me wondering about how punishments targeting the person of the criminal work with corporate personhood. Is there a guideline for how a court handles imprisoning (or executing) a corporate person?
united-states Corporations cannot be sentenced to imprisonment or death; it would be an absurdity. They can certainly be sentenced to pay a fine, as well as various other punishments. A fine can be so large that it takes away all the corporation's assets, effectively destroying it; this is the closest thing to a &quot;death penalty&quot;. There's a good summary in &quot;Corporate Criminal Liability: An Overview of Federal Law&quot; by Charles Doyle, prepared for the Congressional Research Service. Sentencing is discussed on page 20. Corporations cannot be incarcerated. Nor can they be put to death. Otherwise, corporations and individuals face many of the same consequences following conviction. Corporations can be fined. They can be placed on probation. They can be ordered to pay restitution. Their property can be confiscated. They can be barred from engaging in various types of commercial activity. The rest of the section discusses these various possibilities. Under &quot;Fines&quot; is the following note: The corporate fine Guidelines begin with the premise that a totally corrupt corporation should be fined out of existence, if the statutory maximum permits. A corporation operated for criminal purposes or by criminal means should be fined at a level sufficient to strip it of all of its assets. See the article for further information, together with citations for all its claims.
Yes Companies can own companies - that’s what subsidiaries are. On a practical level, you know this is true because you actually have an example. Companies House would not have allowed its registration (barring error) if it was illegal. Why can’t it open a bank account? Banks (or any other business) can choose who they will and won’t do business with. Unless it’s discrimination on the basis of a protected characteristic, it’s not illegal. Since juridical persons don’t have protected characteristics (apart from nationality) it’s virtually impossible to illegally discriminate against them.
Considering that the US legal system is more or less similar in practice to the English Courts, yes it is possible to plea bargian a deal. I'm linking to the wikipedia article on the matter with a specific link to the England and Wales for guidence. Normally, I'd explain, but I'm an American and the differences between Magistrate and Crown courts are big enough differences that I can't tell you what the differences in the case is. I should point out this is a legal area where America differences with much of the world. 90% of the United States criminal cases (and a good number of civil cases, which are settled privately before discovery phase) are plea bargained to lesser sentences. Additionally remorse has nothing to do with the plea bargain. You might only be sorry that you got caught breaking the law and can still plea. The lighter sentence is sort of a "thank you" for saving the state money in not having to build their case against you. It is also used to coerce cooperation with the police, as they may have the accused dead to rights and can prosecute him successfully, but he's a little fish who can give intel to a big fish (this usually comes with the caveat of it being a sworn statement, so they can still prosecute you for something if you're lying... OR that the deal holds on condition that everything is factually true. If evidence contradicts you, you're charged as if you never made a deal). It's also important to note that the police will not honor their deals made for your confession... but they will offer you deals (In the United States, police are allowed to lie to you and do it all the time). However, the prosecutor will honor their deals. Another thing to be aware of is that a prosecutor who offers a plea could be doing so because they have a weak case. If you are absolutely sure the prosecutor has the wrong guy, it may be to your benefit to go to trial and have them prove it. Innocent people do go to jail all the time because they think there is something worse on them than the plea deal and its hard to fight off as you cannot appeal a plea deal as easily as a court conviction. Finally, most jurisdictions allow the judge final say at sentencing, so if the prosecutor does honor the deal and advises the sentence, don't get upset if the judge is tougher and gives you a harsher sentence on the crime, or rejects your plea outright (expect him to scold the prosecutor for wasting his time with a horrible deal, too. Watch the Law and Order SVU episode Raw for a particularly wonderful instance of this rare event occurring). As a part of US federalism, the rules about this change from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, so make sure you understand this. Another thing to be aware of is that a prosecutor who offers a plea could be doing so because they have a weak case. If you are absolutely sure the prosecutor has the wrong guy, it may be to your benefit to go to trial and have them prove it. Innocent people do go to jail all the time because they think there is something worse on them than the plea deal and its hard to fight off as you cannot appeal a plea deal as easily as a court conviction. I would definitely do some leg work into the English Legal system's opinions on plea bargains. Just because they have it does not mean the state lawyers like employing it and many jurisdictions see it as full on corruption in other parts of the world, even the Common Law jurisdictions.
Other Entities means Legal Person The reason for the term &quot;legal person&quot; is that some legal persons are not people: companies and corporations are &quot;persons&quot; legally speaking (they can legally do most of the things an ordinary person can do), but they are not people in a literal sense (human beings) This is very similar to Corporate Personhood. Among the recognized items for legal personhood are usually groups of people, such as a corporation, states or countries, but also churches and temples. In rare cases, Temple buildings and at least two rivers are legal persons. All non-natural legal persons have in common, that they are represented by natural persons - aka humans. A computer program is not represented by a natural person. A natural person (possibly representing a legal person) can use a program to agree to a contract, but a program agreeing on its own is not following the basic principle of a contract, which requires a meeting of the minds on the offer. The computer program becomes the tool that facilitates the contract, for example by offering a prewritten contract to people that want to use the service. Since the contract is usually offered by the service providers as is with no renegotiation allowed, those contracts can only be accepted or not - their side of the bargain is offered and then facilitated by the computer of the service provider - we have an invitation to treat. If a natural or legal person is able to agree (through its representative), the contract becomes binding. If you are not a legal person - so neither a human nor one of the recognized categories - you can not agree to the TOS, the contract is void.
You can have as many people with the same job title as you wish. You can have more than one CEO as well, although that would be weird and confusing. Nothing prohibits this and CTO isn't even a traditional and core executive title anyway. This will be confusing to everyone involved, as grammatically and in the common English language usage of the word, a C-level officer is usually singular, so the people with that title may resent the fact that they don't really hold the post that their title implies, but tough. By way of comparison, it isn't unusual for big banks to have hundreds of vice presidents. Also, third parties are entitled to assume in a legally binding way that everyone with the title CTO has the authority associated with that title, even if that isn't the case, under the agency principle of "apparent authority". So, the more C-level officers you have, the easier it is for the company to be legally bound by actions they take and the harder it is to assert centralized control over company operations.
Maybe, but we'll probably never know for sure. Officially, of course, he was not punished for his speech. He was punished for selling explosives without a license, which he admitted to. (He was also charged with illegally storing explosives and illegally mailing 'injurious material," but those charges were dropped in exchange for his guilty plea on the first count.) Whether those charges were a pretext to retaliate is probably unknowable. While it's a well-known fact that law enforcement frequently retaliates against people for exercising their right to free speech, this guy's story doesn't sound very credible. There is precedent for a prosecution for distributing Pest Control Report 2000, including the prosecution of white supremacist Leo Felton, a sad-sack loser who used the same material to build a bomb around to incite a "racial holy war" the same time. And just about a month after Ver's conviction, the man who owned the company that manufactured the product was convicted of violating federal explosives and transportation laws. Several months after that, he and his company entered into a consent decree with the Consumer Product Safety Commission ordering them to stop manufacturing Pest Control Report 2000.
"Criminal organization" is an informal term with no legal significance. It is, however, often used to refer to something specifically addressed by [18 USC 96], the RICO statutes. The definitions section refers to "racketeering activity", "pattern of racketeering activity", and "enterprise". The first term which starts by enumerating murder, kidnapping, gambling, arson, robbery, bribery, extortion, dealing in obscene matter, or dealing in a controlled substance or listed chemical, and moving on to pretty much every crime there is. "Pattern of racketeering activity" is committing two or more crimes. An "enterprise" includes any individual, partnership, corporation, association, or other legal entity, and any union or group of individuals associated in fact although not a legal entity 18 USC 1962(c), for example, says It shall be unlawful for any person employed by or associated with any enterprise engaged in, or the activities of which affect, interstate or foreign commerce, to conduct or participate, directly or indirectly, in the conduct of such enterprise’s affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity or collection of unlawful debt. The italicized part refers obliquely to the Commerce Clause, and similar expressions are commonly used to give the federal government the authority to outlaw or restrict certain activities, if they have something to do with business. The bold parts draw in what are commonly considered to be "a criminal organization", that is, an "enterprise", which has a "pattern of racketeering behavior". Theoretically, the above scenario might fall within the ambit of RICO. There is a manual for RICO prosecution, which gives massive amounts of detail. I think the main issue in deciding whether to pursue a given organization is whether the organization seems to be by nature corrupt, as opposed to having some high-ranking corrupt people. There may be other reasons for not prosecuting under RICO.
Your question is the subject of longstanding and ongoing debate that has generated countless articles and books and dissertations, so you're probably not going to get a fully satisfactory answer here. But here's the short version: Different systems operate on different assumptions. Your question suggests you are not a retributivist, i.e., someone who views sentencing as a means for taking retribution for the criminal's offenses. Some systems (most, I imagine) are built around that idea, but some view criminal sentencing primarily as a means of preventing recidivism, or as a means for achieving rehabilitation, the interests you indicated you see as more important. And even within those systems, there are still different ideas about what you're actually trying to do. Again, you've indicated that you subscribe to an intent-based system (a punishment keyed to what the criminal intended to do), but that approach competes with harm-based sentencing (punishment for the harm the criminal actually caused). While equal punishments make sense from an intent-based approach, they are less justifiable from a harm-based approach. Few would say that attempted murder inflicts the same amount of harm as completed murder, and so that system does not call for the same amount of punishment. Because there are different approaches, sentencing guidelines vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The U.S. Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which I would classify as adopting a harm-based retributivism, treat attempts less severely than completed offenses, but other systems treat them equally.