Can a corporation be pardoned?

Nature of Corporate Crime

• Several comments question what it means for a corporation to commit a crime when it can’t think or act except through humans, raising concerns about “collective punishment.”
• Others argue corporations do exhibit emergent behavior: complex structures and incentives produce actions no single individual clearly “owns,” making individual blame hard to sort out.
• High-level policies can incentivize illegality without ever saying “break the law,” e.g., unrealistic performance targets or opaque data retention rules.

Limited Liability, Personhood, and Responsibility

• Strong criticism of corporate personhood and limited liability: corporations enjoy rights (e.g., speech) but often face only weak penalties for serious harms.
• Some want the corporate veil removed or much easier to pierce, especially for executives who enrich themselves through unlawful strategies while the firm pays the fine.
• Others defend limited liability as socially useful to enable investment and protect small business owners, but accept it should be waivable or pierceable in extreme misconduct.

Corporate Death Penalty vs Bankruptcy

• Debate over a “corporate death penalty”: revoking a charter and liquidating assets vs ordinary bankruptcy.
• Proponents see it as a way to make shareholders fear catastrophic loss and thus police management, citing egregious cases (PFAS, opioids) where they would also jail involved executives.
• Critics see dissolution as a “nuclear bomb” that punishes employees and customers more than owners, and fear it would become a lever for political extortion in corrupt systems.
• Some argue bankruptcy plus large fines already function as a de facto death penalty for owners, and that’s usually preferable.

Executives, Shareholders, and Apportioning Guilt

• Many commenters want more criminal and civil liability for executives and directors: willful blindness, negligent oversight, and toxic incentive structures should carry personal consequences.
• Proposals include: presumptive executive guilt when corporate crimes occur; liability scaled by how much someone profited; fines or diluted ownership targeting shareholders during the offending period; and partial government ownership as sanction.
• Others highlight the hard problem of fairly allocating responsibility in complex systems, where illegal outcomes can arise from individually “legal” actions (A+B scenarios) and where scapegoats and shell games are easy to create.

Legal Systems and Precedent

• A side discussion notes frequent citation of foreign precedent, especially in newer common-law systems, and contrasts common law’s focus on precedent with civil law’s statutory focus, while observing that EU and human-rights regimes have pushed civil-law courts toward greater de facto reliance on precedent.