CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
Homicide
Charges Should Be Brought Against Blackwater
21 Corporate Crime Reporter 41, October 18, 2007
Homicide charges should be brought against Blackwater for the killing of seventeen
people in Iraq last month.
That’s the take of Susan Burke, a partner at Burke O’Neil in Philadelphia.
Burke has filed a lawsuit on behalf of three of the families killed and one man who was injured in the September 16 shootings.
The lawsuit alleges that on September 16, 2007, “heavily-armed Blackwater mercenaries working in Iraq began firing on a crowd of innocent civilians without justification, resulting in multiple deaths and injuries.”
The lawsuit alleges that the company “created and fostered a culture of lawlessness amongst its employees encouraging them to act in the company’s financial interests at the expense of innocent human life.”
FBI agents are in Iraq investigating the September 16 incident.
“Prosecutors will be looking at what we are looking at – does this company have a pattern and practice of this type of misconduct?” Burke told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview earlier this week. “Based on information provided by the company to Congress, in 84 percent of the instances where Blackwater was involved in shooting, Blackwater personnel shot first.”
“That’s an alarming statistic,” Burke said. “Certainly when you interview people who have had dealings with Blackwater, it causes concern about the way in which this company has operated and whether or not there is a corporate culture where they are encouraging wrongdoing.”
Ford Motor Company was the last major American corporation to face homicide charges in the United States. In 1978, Ford was charged with homicide in the deaths of three teenaged girls who were burned to death after their Ford Pinto was rear-ended.
State prosecutors in Indiana charged that Ford engaged in criminally reckless conduct in designing an unsafe gas tank – and that it was that faulty design that resulted in the girls’ deaths.
A jury found Ford not guilty.
Burke O’Neil’s practice is an unusual one – a mix of corporate white collar defense in the health care arena and human rights work.
Burke O’Neil is juggling a number of human rights lawsuits, including the Abu Ghraib torture case and the Blackwater case.
Burke is eyeing a lawsuit against U.S. apparel and sports equipment manufacturers who employ child labor abroad.
Burke said she left a mainstream corporate law firm – Montgomery McCracken to set up her own firm. Montgomery McCracken allowed her to bring the torture case, but the case “became fairly controversial within the firm,” she said.
“It was a nice firm with a nice group of people,” Burke said. “But this was an expensive case to bring. And some people were not comfortable with the case. They let me bring the case in. They supported the case while I was there. But it just did not feel like a good fit. It made the firm uncomfortable. At the end of the day, I decided to pull out because the things that they were doing to increase their comfort level just added additional bureaucratic hassles to my practice. It was just no longer a good fit. So I decided rather than try to jump through these hoops – let me just pull out and start my own firm.”
And she did.
Burke has spent time working at other major white collar firms – including Covington & Burling and Mintz Levin in Washington, D.C.
And she has prosecuted health care fraud cases at Main Justice in Washington, D.C. She also worked for a time in-house at Tenet in Philadelphia.
But now she’s defending health care fraud cases half time and suing torturers and killers the other half.
What about the tension that must arise between the two?
“I don’t think there is a tension,” Burke says. “The type of conduct I’m going after – torturing people, killing people – that’s not typical corporate conduct. This is in no way an assault on normal corporations. This is a very narrow area.”
[For a complete transcript of the Interview with Susan Burke, see 21 Corporate Crime Reporter 41(12), October 22, 2007, print edition only.]
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