It does permit something individuals don’t have: the internal investigation.
The internal investigation has determined that our CEO had no knowledge of this, and that the bloody pig mask was all the idea of the people who make less money, and also we fired the CEO for unrelated reasons.
>The internal investigation has determined that our CEO had no knowledge of this, and that the bloody pig mask was all the idea of the people who make less money, and also we fired the CEO for unrelated reasons.
That's exactly how the criminal justice system should work? If you can't prove a particular person is responsible, you don't have a case. That's exactly why they prosecuted the company as a whole instead, because easier to prove the company as a whole did something, rather than a specific person.
The issue is that an internal investigation is not an impartial source.
I agree, in this hypothetical if there's no evidence the that the CEO committed a crime he/she shouldn't go to jail. But considering that "internal investigators" are likely hired (directly or indirectly) by the CEO, are likely shareholders in the company, they have little incentive to fully investigate.
The police certainly aren't perfect, but they at least have less of an incentive to lie about this.
> But considering that "internal investigators" are likely hired (directly or indirectly) by the CEO, are likely shareholders in the company, and so they have little incentive to fully investigate.
Right, but no prosecutor is like "well the CEO had an internal investigation so we're not going to investigate"
I feel like that is exactly what happens for anything but the most serious crimes. Keep in mind, a lot of internal investigations are not reported to the public and we never hear about them. Part of the reason that they're "internal" is so that they stay internal; we only hear about ones that leak.
Even for very serious crimes (e.g. sexual harassment or assault) these internal investigations end up being "sufficient", and the police don't bother.
Right, but unless internal investigations are somehow deterring investigations by prosecutors, I don't see what the issue is. Would you rather than there's no internal investigations?
I'd rather things like sexual assault get directly reported to the police instead of having people directly paid by the accused LARPing as investigators, yes.
You're dodging my earlier question. Do you think internal investigations are substituting for actual criminal investigations, and if so do you have evidence for it? All you're seemingly saying so far is that you don't like internal investigations at all, even if they are done when no criminal investigations would have taken place
I think that internal investigations are acting as a substitute for actual criminal investigations.
By definition if the investigations weren't made public I can't know about them, but you can look at someone like Andy Rubin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Rubin#Sexual_harassment_a...
As far as I'm aware there was never any investigation from real police for him.
>I think that internal investigations are acting as a substitute for actual criminal investigations.
And how does this work? Are prosecutors really like "oh ok, we won't do any investigating of our own then"? If so, who's more to blame, the companies doing the internal investigations, or the prosecutors for falling for it? If the police show up to a residence to investigate a domestic violence report, and then one of spouses answers the door and says everything's fine, should we blame the spouse more or the police for not following up?
I think it is much simpler than what you’re describing.
Executive at BigCo does something bad. Normally people would report this to police and/or regulatory agency. Instead the company investigates itself to pretend they’re doing their due diligence so that there is a paper record, but with no intention of actually surfacing anything to the police.
No one can prove the CEO did anything, but whatever it was it was worth 500x as much as the average employee.