What is the difference between civil fraud and criminal fraud? Is it due to the severity of the fraud.that is to say the amount of money lost? Is it measured by the depth of the deception? Is it defined by the frequency of fraudulent actions? Or is the test, the burden of proof, that a situation is tried as civil fraud (preponderance of evidence) because it is too hard to prove criminally ("guilty beyond a reasonable doubt")? Is there an analogy between this and OJ Simpon's acquittal for criminal murder and a conviction on a civil charge?
A civil fraud is one pursued by a private plaintiff against the defendant and must be proved on the balance of probabilities. Success by the plaintiff results in restitution in the form of damages being payable from the defendant to the plaintiff. A criminal fraud is one pursued by the state against the defendant and must be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Success by the state results in punishment of the defendant by fine, community service, imprisonment etc. The same fraud may result in a civil case, a criminal case, both or neither.
The question to be answered is &quot;did the state prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt&quot;, the answer to which should have no reasonable doubt. The interests of the defendant are sufficiently protected by the basic burden of proof requirement. The alternative that a single vote of not guilty exonerates the defendant would seriously hobble the interests of the people, and the alternative of automatic mistrial would make trials prohibitively expensive. The unanimity requirement does mean that in case of initial disagreement, parties have to re-think their positions, which is not a bad thing. The question of whethar a supermajority of guilty votes suffices for conviction was decided in a recent case, Ramos v. Louisiana, allowing conviction with a 10-2 vote. The court takes unanimity to be a basic common law right from the 14th century. Louisiana and Oregon had unconventional schemes allowing less than unanimous decisions: the reasoning behind the unanimity requirement is discussed extensively in that opinion. Since Alito, Roberts and Kagan dissented in part, the rationale for the other view is also spelled out.
In new-jersey, the offence of perjury is defined at 2C:28-1 of the Code of Criminal Justice A person is guilty of perjury, a crime of the third degree, if in any official proceeding he makes a false statement under oath or equivalent affirmation, or swears or affirms the truth of a statement previously made, when the statement is material and he does not believe it to be true. The Code also provides an opportunity for retraction. Assuming that the statement is material, whether answering &quot;no&quot; is perjury will depend on the witness's understanding of the question and his belief about the truth of the answer. If we assume that the witness understands the question to be about parentage in general, including by adoption, and if we assume that they know they have an adopted child, the answer &quot;no&quot; would be perjury. If instead we assume that the witness understood the question to be narrowly about biological parentage, or if they had forgotten at the time of their answer that they had an adopted child, then the answer &quot;no&quot; would not be perjury.
The phrase "reasonable doubt" was formed hundreds of years ago, and does not hold any mathematical or probabilistic meaning. It is for each individual juror to decide for themselves what constitutes "reasonable doubt", and whether the evidence presented to them has crossed that threshold. EDIT for extra clarity: As stated above, the definition of "reasonable doubt" is intentionally vague*, and left to be decided by each juror for themselves on a case by case basis; as such there is no single rule that can be applied to jurors (also note barring accepting a bribe, a juror cannot be legally sanctioned for their conduct as a juror, nor their vote, regardless of the evidence before them). So one juror might judge by P(A|B), another might judge by the defendant's appearance, another might judge by the majority of their peers (so that they can go to a ball game that evening, such as in the film 12 Angry Men), another might disagree with the law (see: jury nullification) and so vote not guilty on that basis, and another might bow to social pressure and convict despite overwhelming evidence that the defendant is not guilty (for example, at the end of To Kill A Mockingbird). A prosecutor cares about convincing the entire jury that the defendant is guilty(outside of Oregon and Louisiana, where only 10/12 vote is needed to convict, so the prosecutor only cares convincing 10 jurors). The defense only cares about convincing a single juror (or three in LA or OR), although more can be useful to prevent a mistrial. The defense (in theory) should not care whether or not the defendant is guilty. *The origin of reasonable doubt was in Britain, where certain jurors would refuse to convict, despite any evidence, due to religious prohibitions of "Judge not, less ye be judged".
Falsification of evidence, forgery of documents, destruction of evidence (which is called &quot;spoliation&quot;), giving false testimony under oath or otherwise, and all manner of other similar conduct can make it hard to impose civil liability in the court system (or to prevent its imposition when it isn't called for), and does happen from time to time. Sometimes it is more blatant and verifiable. Other times it involves testimony that you know is clearly false but proving that is difficult or impossible. In my experience, medical malpractice defendants who are medical doctors routinely lie in testimony in ways that are non-verifiable, but very rarely falsify documents or provide false testimony regarding verifiable facts, frequently setting up a credibility fight for a finder of fact (i.e. judge in bench trial or jury in a jury trial). Medical doctors tend to be more honest and use fewer fraudulent litigation tactics than law enforcement officers sued in civil rights actions, but are less honest on average than business managers who are in commercial litigation who aren't in sales, and also less honest on average than professionals in mechanical and engineering fields. Fraudulent litigation conduct tends to be more common when the alleged wrongdoing is emotionally charged and personal. Judges usually take great pains to refrain from calling any witness out for lying, unless there is unequivocal evidence that an intentional lie, rather than a situation where a failure of memory or misperception led to a disputed issue of fact. This kind of conduct almost never gives rise to criminal charges when it does happen in civil litigation. It often leads to sanctions against the litigant who uses this tactic in the context of the court case (often quite draconian ones) and it sometimes leads to ethical complaints against an attorney for someone who does this (or who does this personally) knowing that it is being done in the case, often resulting in a lengthy suspension of a license to practice law or disbarment. The consequences of this kind of conduct can be career ending and economically unsurvivable when a court feels that someone has done so. I've seen awards in excess of $1 billion in lawsuits involving large publicly held companies where this has been documented. Identifying cases where this happens is more art than science, and often involves a healthy amount of good luck. There is no one strategy involved in identifying it, but seeking the same information from multiple sources and finding inconsistent results, noticing subtle irregularities in documents, understanding the context of the situation and what usually happens when people are honest, are among the methods used. It is very difficult to defeat this fraudulent efforts to present false evidence, and even when falsification is discovered it is often discovered at such a late stage that it may be difficult or impossible to remedy the harm done. It is always more expensive to deal with these kinds of tactics, although the magnitude of the extra costs varies wildly. Most of the time, it is never discovered at all unless the stakes in the case are so high that extraordinary efforts to leave no stone unturned are justified economically in the litigation. There are tactics that can be taken to reduce the likelihood of misconduct (like securing access to documentation and taking witness statements as soon as possible and ideally before a records custodian realizes its significance), but none are foolproof. A fairly typical example of this was in a securities fraud case that I once represented plaintiffs in, in which the defendant submitted one set of bank statements in response to discovery requests from us, and the same bank statements obtained by subpoena directly from the bank revealed that the defendant had photoshopped years of bank statements in an effort to deceive the plaintiffs. Generally speaking, the larger the bureaucracies involved in the case, and the more people who were involved in the situation, the harder it is to get away with something along these lines. For example, in a medical malpractice case, an instance of malpractice that happens in the office of a doctor who practices alone with only one staff person who is also her husband, demonstrated by a single in house document is much easier to cover up with fraud than a pattern of conduct in a large health care provider network involving encounters with dozens of professionals at multiple large hospitals generating thousands of pages of documentation, and managed by third-party administrators. Ultimately, there is only so much you can do to hedge against the risk that parties to lawsuits will engage in fraudulent conduct. But, because of the dire consequences that arise when someone is caught red handed doing so, this kind of litigation conduct is very rare. While false or misleading testimony on &quot;squishy&quot; issues of motive or opinion, or on impossible to verify points like recollections of unrecorded conversations, happens in perhaps one in five or so actively litigated cases, outright fraudulent tactics of the kinds discussed in the OP probably happens in significantly less than one case in twenty actively litigated cases, but probably does happen in at least one actually actively litigated case in two hundred cases. In the absence of omniscience, or Wonder Woman's lasso of truth, this is the best that lawyers and the judicial system can do. This kind of conduct is sufficiently rare that it doesn't materially upset the usefulness of the legal system for seeking recourse in civil actions. There are backstops like bankruptcy that exist, in part, in recognition of the fact that courts sometimes reach unjust results. Far more cases are wrongly decided due to attorney or judicial incompetence in cases with a complete absence of fraudulent litigation conduct, or from the misguided whims and misunderstandings of juries in cases with a complete absence of fraudulent litigation misconduct, than are wrongly decided as a result of successful fraudulent litigation misconduct. Also, even when fraudulent tactics are used in litigation and aren't caught, these tactics don't always turn the tide in favor of the party using them in litigation, because the people who use those kinds of tactics often don't have a good understanding of what facts are and are not legally important in their cases. It also isn't uncommon for fraudulent litigation tactics to be used in cases where the person employing them is actually in the right on the merits in the absence of these tactics, even though they are unscrupulous when it comes to their responses to accusations of wrongdoing. So, fraudulent litigation conduct doesn't always do substantive harm in the sense of producing a wrong judicial outcome, even when it is successful.
Barela was convicted of robbery affecting interstate commerce and faces a sentence of up to 20 years and $250,000 in fines. I assume your issue is that you think this is too high (although I don't see what it has to do with the 14th or 6th Amendments). Fortunately, it's also almost completely unrelated to the actual sentence. The number that was quoted is the statutory maximum for robbery or extortion affecting interstate commerce. It represents the maximum amount that any defendant under any circumstances could receive for one count of that crime. A career criminal who threatened to kill an armored car guard in order to steal $10,000,000 would face the same 20-year statutory maximum as someone with no record who threatened to give COVID to a store clerk in order to steal $90. In some situations, things like the amount stolen or the defendant's criminal record affect the actual crime the defendant is convicted of. At the federal level, that's mostly not the case. Robbery affecting interstate commerce doesn't have degrees or statutory enhancements. Instead, a judge decides what sentence is appropriate. The judge can, in theory, pick anything between the statutory minimum (here there is none) and the statutory maximum (here it's 20 years). 18 U.S. Code § 3553 lays out the factors for the court to consider. In practice, federal courts generally sentence within the range given in the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. While the statute itself doesn't distinguish between stealing $90 by threatening to cough and stealing millions by threatening to shoot, the Guidelines do. Courts don't have to follow the Guidelines range but typically do. If they don't, it's much more likely their sentence will be overturned as unreasonable on appeal. Popehat has a good blog post on the Guidelines, how they work, and why press releases quoting statutory maximums are basically straight-up lies. Sentencing.us has an unofficial calculator you can use to estimate the Guidelines range for a particular crime. If you plug in 18 U.S. Code § 1951 (which translates to the &quot;Robbery&quot; guideline) and enter in $90 stolen, no weapon used, no threat of death, and no criminal record, then you get a range of 33-41 months and/or a fine of $7,500 to $75,000. This is basically the lowest Guidelines range possible for robbery. For comparison, under California state law robbery is punishable by two, three, or five years in state prison. Robbery is a serious and violent crime, so a sentence of multiple years would not be considered unreasonable. But it takes a lot for the Guidelines range to approach the statutory maximum of 20 years.
It obviously varies by jurisdiction, but most jurisdictions I am familiar with have something like a "Statute of Limitations" where crimes cannot be prosecuted after a certain length of time because it was "too long ago". The logic is firstly that if you prosecute a pensioner for stealing a bottle of beer from a shop when they were 18, the person you are prosecuting is very different from the person that committed the crime. Secondly, it is very hard to obtain a fair trial after the passing of a long period of time. As far as I know, all jurisdictions vary the length of time depending on the severity of the crime, and the most serious crimes are never time-limited. Rape usually falls into the category of "never time-limited". Of course, although murder and rape can be prosecuted after 15+ years, the difficulty of obtaining a fair trial, and of producing evidence from that long ago, means that they may not be. Finally note that "prosecution" of the accused is often not the primary aim of accusers. They just want to say "this was wrong". Abused individuals often find it very hard to speak out about the abuse; the current scandals have made it that bit easier, by reassuring them that it isn't just them (see the #metoo campaign for example).
Fraud is fraud From what you say, the US company has had no revenue, no expenses, and no profit/loss. To say otherwise is what is colloquially known as a “lie”. A lie is also the term for it legally. To lie in order to receive a benefit like, say, a good credit rating, is called fraud. That’s illegal in the USA; I’m not familiar with Dutch law but I suspect it’s illegal there too.