Victoria Lynn Swigert

Corporate Homicide: Definitional Processes in the Creation of Deviance

A conception of corporate behavior as criminal has entered the scientific and popular vocabulary. This has been accompanied by an expansion of common law to include the activities of corporations. The definitional change is exemplified by the indictment and trial of Ford Motor Company on charges of reckless homicide. The present work focuses on the history of events surrounding this precedent action. Using information from media accounts, it explores the definitional processes by which the worlds second largest automobile manufacturer was indicted as criminal. Content analysis of these reports suggests that the expansion of legal parameters to include formerly exempt behavior was preceded by the development of a vocabulary of deviance, personalization of harm, and attributions of nonrepentance to the offender. Public reevaluation of corporate actors and actions in terms of a vocabulary previously reserved for conventional criminality, the transformation of the definition from one of product defect and diffuse consumer cost to one of personal injury, and depiction of the corporation as refusing to recognize the harms associated with its acts, it is argued, opened the way to the application of criminal statutes.

Adjudication in Homicide: An Interpretive Analysis of the Effects of Defendant and Victim Social Characteristics

Research on differential justice suggests the need for analyses of the independent and interactive effects of offender and victim social characteristics on judicial decisions. The article that follows addresses this issue through an application of analysis of variance to data on the adjudication of cases in homicide (N = 444 defendants and 432 victims). The findings of the study suggest that male defendants, white, female, and higher-status victims, and lower-status persons held in the death of those of higher status elicit the more severe legal response. We argue that this pattern may be a product of an interpretive process wherein authorities come to rely on the social attributes of actors in arriving at determinations of culpability in an offense characterized by complex social relationships. That the analysis reveals no differences in the adjudication of inter- and intraracial and inter- and intragender offenses, or independent effects of the defendants race or occupational prestige on adjudication also has implications for the findings of prior research in these areas.

The Corporation in Criminology: New Directions for Research

Beginning with the work of Edwin Sutherland, contributions to the study of corporate crime have been prescriptive in orientation. Such a value stance, it is argued, has clouded empirical investigation of the issue. This article suggests an alternative approach, one oriented toward a definitional perspective on crime. Within this framework, attention may be shifted to empirically neutral questions regarding the causes and processes of changing conceptions of corporate liability.