Main Street

Ruthlessly Punitive or Endlessly Forgiving

It’s worth revisiting something Chris Hayes said at our Working Class at the Tipping Point event in June.

“At the bottom of the pyramid,” he said, “America is a ruthlessly punitive and accountability-obsessed society. At the top of the pyramid, it is endlessly forgiving. Before trust can be restored, accountability has to be established.”

About that:

A Morgan Stanley wealth manager will not face felony charges for a hit-and-run because Colorado prosecutors don’t want him to lose his job.

Martin Joel Erzinger, who manages more than $1 billion in assets for Morgan Stanley in Denver, is being accused only of a misdemeanor for allegedly driving his Mercedes into a cyclist and then fleeing the scene, Colorado’s Vail Daily reports. The victim, Dr. Steven Milo, whom Erzinger allegedly hit in July, suffered spinal cord injuries, bleeding from his brain and, according to his lawyer Harold Haddon, “lifetime pain.”

The prosecutor’s official rationale seems to be that Erzinger will be paying restitution to Milo as the presumed outcome of a civil suit, and that therefore it’s in Milo’s interest to have Erzinger employed. But, uh, do you believe that? I don’t believe that. Because that logic could be applied to just about anyone who does anything to hurt anyone else. You could be making minimum wage and the person you ran over would still have more chance of getting money from you in the future if you didn’t have a felony on your record. So unless this prosecutor has used this logic in a case where a, I don’t know, assistant in a nursing home hit someone and fled, it sure looks like this is a case of someone getting away with a crime because he’s wealthy.

Ruthlessly punitive at the bottom, endlessly forgiving at the top. Until we start to change that, some number of people at the top will keep on doing anything they think they can get away with. We knew they’d been getting away with taking people’s paid-for houses and the like. But leaving a man bleeding by the side of the road? It’s not necessarily worse, but you’d think at least it would be harder to use “but I’m a wealthy banker” as a way to evade justice.

Tags: Wall Street