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Corporate Punishment

Document Cited authorities 2 Cited in Related
AuthorGary Slapper
DOI10.1350/jcla.2010.74.3.629
Published date01 June 2010
Date01 June 2010
JCL 74(3) dockie..JCL629 Slapper - Opinion .. Page181 OPINION
Corporate Punishment
Gary Slapper*
Professor of Law, and Director of the Centre for Law, at the Open University,
door tenant at 36 Bedford Row
Some lawyers have been a bit wry about the penalties of the law. The
American attorney F. Lee Bailey once observed that ‘I have knowingly
defended a number of guilty men. But the guilty never escape un-
scathed. My fees are sufficient punishment for anyone’.1 None the less,
punishment is the skeleton of the criminal justice system. It gives
structure to the criminal law and makes it solid. Punishment is also a
way of manifesting and ranking a society’s league table of wrongdoing
by reflecting the idea, for example, that a rapist has done something
worse than a graffitist.
It is a widely shared principle that the worse the crime, the worse
should be the punishment. There are many nuanced exceptions to that
proposition—for example, however bad the crime of a four-year-old, we
would not use the criminal justice system to punish him. In general,
though, a serious crime entails a serious sentence. In light of the prin-
ciple that the worse the crime, the worse the punishment, one might
expect that unlawfully killing people would be among the most seri-
ously punished offences. It certainly is where individuals commit
murder or manslaughter, but where a corporation is found guilty of
manslaughter it is now not certain that the culprit would, under a new
sentencing guideline, receive an appropriately serious sentence.
The new sentencing guideline2 should be set in its brief historical
contact. The first chapter of corporate manslaughter law in the UK
began on 2 February 1965, but it was rather an empty chapter. The Times
reported what was then an important innovation in English law: the
first time a company had stood trial for manslaughter. But since then
over 40,000 people have been killed at their work or in commercial
disasters like those involving ferries and trains while prosecutions for
corporate manslaughter have totalled at just 38.
The old common law made it very difficult to prosecute companies
because the ‘doctrine of identification’ required the prosecution to pin
all the blame on at least one director whose will was identified as the
‘mind’ of the company. As companies commonly had...

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