Virginia Law School Wants Secret Corporate Crime Settlement Agreements Made Public

The University of Virginia School of Law wants thirty corporate crime settlements agreements made public.

In a letter last month, Jon Ashley, a business research librarian at the law school, called on the Justice Department to release the agreements, including those with some major corporations including ConAgra, Edward D. Jones, Quest Diagnostics, HSBC and Swift Beef.

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The law school, under the direction of Professor Brandon Garrett, has created two databases containing hundreds of corporate settlements agreements — one of deferred and non prosecution agreements and one of guilty pleas. But thirty are still under wraps. And Garrett wants them made public.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department released one such secret agreement after Ashley sued under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

And the law school is planning another FOIA lawsuit soon — if the Justice Department doesn’t release the thirty secret agreements.

“The lack of transparency in these major corporate cases has been a major concern of mine for years,” Garrett said. “We are trying to shine some light on these cases. You would think the deals themselves should be public because prosecutors would want to advertise that they held the company accountable. About thirty of these corporate settlement agreements have been sealed just by informal agreement between the prosecutors and the company. Now I can certainly see why the company would prefer not to have information out there about its crimes. But why the prosecutors would agree is less than clear.”

Garrett is the author of the just released Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations (Harvard University Press, 2014).

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