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Does "Innocent until proven guilty" imply that people have a right to commit crimes in the US if they are willing to accept punishment?
There are very, very few provisions in US law to prevent a crime from being perpetrated. Aside from those states with a "three-strikes" law, involuntary commitment for the mentally ill and continued incarceration of sex offenders after their sentence is completed (all very narrow instances), there are no mechanisms for preventing crime.
Is this because fairness is impossible when trying to prevent possible future crimes? Or is this because American's insist in freedom and this is built into the justice system?
Is there any mechanism to prevent, let's say, a corporation from repeatedly violating the law and just paying its fines and going back to business as usual? Does our system encourage this behavior in some people or institutions?
Is this because fairness is impossible when trying to prevent possible future crimes? Or is this because American's insist in freedom and this is built into the justice system?
Is there any mechanism to prevent, let's say, a corporation from repeatedly violating the law and just paying its fines and going back to business as usual? Does our system encourage this behavior in some people or institutions?
societyunderstand
So when you ask do people have a right to commit crimes if they're willing to accept the punishment, you could look at it that way. You could think it's alright to murder someone or steal, as long as I do the punishment for it. Most people including myself will not look at it that way. I believe that a law prohibiting something does not give you the right to do it. We're not talking about ethics here, we're talking about rights we have.
Did you know that in America and other countries, a corporation is considered to have the same rights legally as a human being. This is why Microsoft and Google can be sued so many times without their people being held accountable. I'm not going to say that their fines are insucufficent, as they are known to of suffered hefty fines multiple times. What I can say is that if a company doesn't do wrong to a person, let's be technical here, a person, then the company being sued isn't really going to make the CEOs liable. All that will happen is that the company will suffer financially.
Nothing happened to the people of Google, did it, when their Google Street View cars were found to be hacking encrypted wireless network information and passwords. Nobody got a criminal record over that. If you did that, you would.