No. of Recommendations: 7
But Your Honor, I know I'm a Fiduciary Officer of This Company, but it really wasn't my job to prevent those accountants who work for me from fleecing the shareholders. Great defense there.
Again, you're missing the point. You can't argue this by analogy, because that's not how criminal statutes work. A criminal statute will have an actual, formal definition of a crime. If you don't meet the actual elements of the crime, you can't be convicted of that crime. The specifics always matter.
So if, for example, the crime of embezzlement requires "the fraudulent appropriation of property by a person to whom it has been entrusted," then you would need to actually prove that the Fiduciary Officer of the company actually: i) was entrusted; ii) the property; iii) of another; which was iv) fraudulently; v) appropriated by that person. Five separate elements.
So if the accountants were the ones who appropriated the property, and the Fiduciary Officer did not appropriate the property, the FO can't be charged with embezzlement. It might have been his fiduciary obligation to make sure that measures were in place to prevent embezzlement - but to be charged with embezzlement, you have to actually have been the one to appropriate the property. Only the person who appropriated the property can be convicted of that specific crime.
The same is true of most criminal statutes, including the relevant ones that were talked about with Clinton. There are statutes that make it a crime to remove classified information from where it is supposed to be, or to receive classified information if you're not cleared....but Clinton didn't remove the info, and she was cleared to have it. So she couldn't be charged under those crimes. There isn't a catch-all "misuse of classified information" crime. Nothing she did actually matched up with the elements of any specific crimes, so she couldn't be charged.
Anyway, I'm off for the evening, so everyone enjoy the fulminations about the Trump verdict without me!
