Justice is Mocked if an Important Law is Unenforced
| Author | Gary Slapper |
| Published date | 01 April 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1350/jcla.2013.77.2.821 |
| Date | 01 April 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Opinion |
OPINION
Justice Is Mocked If An Important Law Is
Unenforced
Gary Slapper*
Global Professor, New York University, Director of New York University in
London, door tenant at 36 Bedford Row
The 18th century Lord Chancellor, Baron Thurlow, said that companies
could not be convicted of crimes. He said, ‘Did you ever expect a
corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and
no body to be kicked?’.1The process by which the law made companies
responsible for culpable conduct causing death was a slow one. From the
outset, the company as a district body was not liable for such a crime and
neither were the shareholders. In 1911, Ambrose Bierce defined a
company in his Devil’s Dictionary as ‘an ingenious device for obtaining
individual profit without individual responsibility’.
Today we have a different attitude and recognise that the small
percentage of companies that commit crimes can and should be pun-
ished under the law.
The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 was
promulgated as a strong law. It made it easier for companies or organisa-
tions whose lethal gross negligence killed people to be prosecuted and
convicted. That was an important development because the death rate at
work and in commercially related disasters was high (over 50,000
people have been killed at work in the UK since 1967), the evidence
from the Factory Inspectorate and later from the Health and Safety
Executive (HSE) was clear that management was blameworthy in most
cases, and yet there were only six convictions for manslaughter under
the old common law prior to 6 April 2008 when the Act came into
effect.
In preparing the legislation the government said in its Regulatory
Impact Assessment that it estimated that the new offence would result
in ‘10–13 additional prosecutions for corporate manslaughter each
year’.2That would yield a figure of about 60 prosecutions to the end of
* The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the views of New York University, 36 Bedford Row, or The Journal of Criminal
Law.
1Real Estate Opportunities Ltd v Aberdeen Asset Managers Jersey Ltd [2007] 2 All ER 791 at
805. Sometimes quoted differently as ‘Corporations have neither bodies to be
punished, nor souls to be condemned; they therefore do as they like’ from John
Poynder, Literary Extracts, vol. 1 (1844) 268.
2 Cabinet Office, ‘New Bill to enable delivery of swift and efficient regulatory reform
to cut red tape—Jim Murphy’, Cabinet Office News Release, 12 January 2006
(Cabinet Office Press Office, London), available at http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.
uk/20071001194811/bre.berr.gov.uk/regulation/news/2006/060111.asp, accessed 14
February 2013.
91The Journal of Criminal Law (2013) 77 JCL 91–94
doi:10.1350/jcla.2013.77.2.821
To continue reading
Request your trial