- 25 Jan 2013 15:11
#14156848
I'm thinking that something we may be missing from the law today is punishments of humiliation.
It used to be that back in the day, if you did something that was bad but not really bad, they wouldn't imprison you or execute you, they would lock you up in one of those wooden restraints and let everyone throw rotten fruit at you all day. No real harm done, but you probably wouldn't repeat what you did earlier.
Today, we only have three real remedies. We take money from people, we imprison them, and in some countries we execute them.
The problem with the first remedy, in the form of punitive damages, is that not everyone cares to lose some money. When big bankers and corporate CEO's get fined for what their company has done, they take it out of the pensions or bonuses of their minions and it's no sweat off of their back. The US Supreme Court has limited the amount that can be paid in punitive damages as well, I think it's 9x the actual damages if memory serves (though most states have since limited it to 3x the actual damages), which further limits the efficacy of punitive damages. Basically, they aren't capable of being truly punitive anymore. This was in response to things like 100x punitive damages of course, but my point is that punitive damages just don't seem to work.
Now, imagine that instead of fining the heads of the big banks some money that they truly don't need to care about, or fining someone who breached a $10,000 contract in bad faith an extra $30,000 when they're a millionaire and wouldn't blink at $100,000, what if instead they had to wear pig noses and have rotten fruit thrown at them every day for a week. They might actually care about that and we wouldn't have to argue about the amount of damages (which can take forever to determine) or whether or not they were bad enough to go to jail.
What do you guys think? Crazy idea or were earlier legal systems onto something?
It used to be that back in the day, if you did something that was bad but not really bad, they wouldn't imprison you or execute you, they would lock you up in one of those wooden restraints and let everyone throw rotten fruit at you all day. No real harm done, but you probably wouldn't repeat what you did earlier.
Today, we only have three real remedies. We take money from people, we imprison them, and in some countries we execute them.
The problem with the first remedy, in the form of punitive damages, is that not everyone cares to lose some money. When big bankers and corporate CEO's get fined for what their company has done, they take it out of the pensions or bonuses of their minions and it's no sweat off of their back. The US Supreme Court has limited the amount that can be paid in punitive damages as well, I think it's 9x the actual damages if memory serves (though most states have since limited it to 3x the actual damages), which further limits the efficacy of punitive damages. Basically, they aren't capable of being truly punitive anymore. This was in response to things like 100x punitive damages of course, but my point is that punitive damages just don't seem to work.
Now, imagine that instead of fining the heads of the big banks some money that they truly don't need to care about, or fining someone who breached a $10,000 contract in bad faith an extra $30,000 when they're a millionaire and wouldn't blink at $100,000, what if instead they had to wear pig noses and have rotten fruit thrown at them every day for a week. They might actually care about that and we wouldn't have to argue about the amount of damages (which can take forever to determine) or whether or not they were bad enough to go to jail.
What do you guys think? Crazy idea or were earlier legal systems onto something?
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