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There are worse applications of the death penalty
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Added by
apesphere on 22 Jan 2009
From: online.wsj.com
|
| Image courtesy MashGet via Flickr |
Two men have been sentenced to death and a woman to life imprisonment by the Chinese court trying the milk melamine contamination case.
A great deal of media attention has focused on the sentence passed; another indication, if we needed one, of how fortunate we are to live in freer countries than China.
I am not an advocate of the death penalty. While it appeals to me at an atavistic eye-for-an-eye level, I cannot in good conscience sanction one human's right to deny life to another in the cold light of the courtroom fluorescent tubes.
Despite my concerns, it continues to exist. According to the US Death Penalty Information Center, 1138 executions have been carried out across the country since 1976.
The media is right to draw attention to any use of the death penalty in a way that signifies dissent with that tool of justice. Given, however, the fact that the death penalty is permitted in many countries outside China, including the US, what really distinguishes this story is not the levying of the death penalty but rather the detail of the crime and the defendants.
The subjects of the crime are six dead babies and over 300,000 additional babies made ill.
And what of the perpetrators and their motives?
This was a corporate crime. A crime committed in the pursuit of profit. The two men sentenced to death were middlemen, lacing diluted milk with nitrogen-rich (and kidney-damaging) melamine to fake normal protein levels in milk quality tests.
Tian Wenhua, 66, the former general manager and chairwoman of Sanlu Group Co., the dairy at the center of the crisis, was given a life sentence. During the trial she admitted having known about the problem with the milk for several months before reporting it to authorities.
Before we dismiss this story as just another authoritarian over-reaction to calm an angry public, lets at least learn from it that people running companies can be rightly held guilty of murder too, and worthy of appropriate punishment.
A great deal of media attention has focused on the sentence passed; another indication, if we needed one, of how fortunate we are to live in freer countries than China.
I am not an advocate of the death penalty. While it appeals to me at an atavistic eye-for-an-eye level, I cannot in good conscience sanction one human's right to deny life to another in the cold light of the courtroom fluorescent tubes.
Despite my concerns, it continues to exist. According to the US Death Penalty Information Center, 1138 executions have been carried out across the country since 1976.
The media is right to draw attention to any use of the death penalty in a way that signifies dissent with that tool of justice. Given, however, the fact that the death penalty is permitted in many countries outside China, including the US, what really distinguishes this story is not the levying of the death penalty but rather the detail of the crime and the defendants.
The subjects of the crime are six dead babies and over 300,000 additional babies made ill.
And what of the perpetrators and their motives?
This was a corporate crime. A crime committed in the pursuit of profit. The two men sentenced to death were middlemen, lacing diluted milk with nitrogen-rich (and kidney-damaging) melamine to fake normal protein levels in milk quality tests.
Tian Wenhua, 66, the former general manager and chairwoman of Sanlu Group Co., the dairy at the center of the crisis, was given a life sentence. During the trial she admitted having known about the problem with the milk for several months before reporting it to authorities.
Before we dismiss this story as just another authoritarian over-reaction to calm an angry public, lets at least learn from it that people running companies can be rightly held guilty of murder too, and worthy of appropriate punishment.
Andrew Newton is the author of The Handbook of Compliance: Making Ethics Work in Financial Services
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on 22 Jan 2009
In regard to judging safety practices what about the testing body. What ensures that they were capable? Why wouldn't they have caught the practice earlier? Executives are generally the last to learn minutiae, this use of melamine should have been street knowledge by the time it got to their tiny minds.
It seems to me the government agency has a responsibility and has failed to advance their testing systems.
And that applies to occidental societies as well.