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The World Socialist Web Site reports
Former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship was released from prison [May 10] after serving a one year sentence in connection with the April 2010 explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, which killed 29 coal miners. The Upper Big Branch blast was the worst US mine disaster in 40 years.
Blankenship served the first ten months of his sentence at the Taft Correctional Institution in Southern California. The facility, which houses many white collar criminals, boasts baseball diamonds and soccer fields along with tennis and racquetball courts. Blankenship was then moved to a halfway house for a month and spent the last month prior to his official release at his home in Las Vegas.
In tweets [that] Blankenship posted after his release, the millionaire coal boss showed no remorse for the deaths of 29 miners. He complained that at Taft he had to return to his room several times a day to be counted and could not choose what to watch on TV.
[...] In 2015, Blankenship was convicted on a single misdemeanor count of violating federal safety laws at the mine in Montcoal, West Virginia. The disaster occurred when a spark from a longwall machine ignited a pocket of methane gas, which, in turn, set off a massive coal dust explosion throughout the mine.
Multiple and grave safety violations occurred at the mine when Blankenship issued an order to "run coal", flouting regulations designed to prevent explosions. In an October 2005 memo to the company's deep mine superintendents, Blankenship outlined his priorities. "If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers, or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e., build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever), you need to ignore them and run coal", he wrote.
[...] Four investigations of the disaster found that bits on the longwall machine were broken and worn out, causing sparking. Water nozzles meant to keep the bits cool and prevent sparks were also broken. Proper ventilation to prevent the buildup of methane gas was lacking. Explosive coal dust was allowed to accumulate throughout the mine.
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16 2017, @12:36AM (1 child)
No, we are not "sociopath enough for this" because we are human. This is why we have a criminal justice system, unfortunately one founded on protecting high-functioning sociopaths. We can change that, we must insist that the sub-humans are sanctioned for their behaviour. The end result of not enforcing the law is exactly as you suggest except the people doing it will not in any way be sociopathic. It's called justice; Jeff Sessions and Trey Gowdy may be a good start to having the rule of law actually be enforced.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday May 16 2017, @11:11AM
Seems to me everybody in it is a sociopath, the cops, the lawyers, the judges. The government is predominantly made up of lawyers. We cannot expect non-sociopathic outcomes from a giant collection of sociopaths. A simplistic solution to all that ails us does not exist, but you could get pretty far by banning lawyers from decision making or holding positions of authority.
Washington DC delenda est.