Summary
Vietnam’s High People’s Court upheld the death sentence for real estate tycoon Truong My Lan, convicted of embezzlement and bribery in a record $12 billion fraud case.
Lan can avoid execution by returning $9 billion (three-quarters of the stolen funds), potentially reducing her sentence to life imprisonment.
Her crimes caused widespread economic harm, including a bank run and $24 billion in government intervention to stabilize the financial system.
Lan has admitted guilt but prosecutors deemed her actions unprecedentedly damaging. She retains limited legal recourse through retrial procedures.
It doesn’t act as a deterrent due to the crimes it’s used as a punishment for - no punishment stops a mentally Ill serial killer, someone in mindless rage acting on impulse, or someone who is certain they will never get caught. The studies all agree with that.
But if you would get sentences to life in prison or death from a parking violation or not paying your taxes, there would be zero people doing them as both are conscious actions, and definitely not worth the risk.
Justice is supposed to make the victims whole. Calling for execution for financial crimes helps no one and gives the ruling class, the state or government, more precedent to do it to others.
How does putting someone in jail or having them pay a fine to the government help “make the victims whole” any more than the death sentence would? If that was the point of the justice system, we would only have payments of wealth or services from criminals to victims and nothing else. In fact, I can think of quite a few crimes where the victims would love nothing more than the permission get to kill the criminal themselves in the most painful way possible.
The number one priority of a justice system is to prevent crimes from happening in the first place - a task it has to constantly balance with freedom and human rights as the ultimate solution is to get rid of all criminals - and the more it wants to prevent a certain type of crime, the harsher the punishment for it should be. But as I said, usually the death penalty is used for crimes done by people who aren’t thinking about the consequences.
If you use it as the threat for financial crime, soon you will have no more victims of financial crime, as the criminals are all either dead or too afraid to do it.
Should it be used, for that or in the first place, that’s a completely different argument all together.
You got it. If this person committed fraud they owe damages to the victims of the fraud, not the government. If the government spills this persons blood on the street, what do you get? The only thing that happens is that the punishment for fraud is now death. Do you honestly believe it will stop here? What about the fraudster that commits $100 million worth of fraud? Should they be executed too? What about $10,000? When you apply capital punishment to civil crimes, the application can only ever be arbitrary and unjust.
For this single case in an isolated vacuum, sure.
Outside that you’d get no more fraud, and no more future fraud victims, because the punishment for it wouldn’t be worth the risk for anyone to try.
Like I said, if the punishment for a parking violation was death, every single driver would make damn sure they would never, ever get one. Apply that for every “deliberate” crime and you end up with a society with essentially zero crime.
Also a lot fewer people alive, but zero crime.
Where the line goes is completely up to the justice system, how badly they want to prevent that type of crime, as it goes with every crime and punishment.