Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) introduced legislation this week that aims to make it easier to jail the chief executives of big corporations who allow fraud or other forms of corporate wrongdoing to happen on their watch, the Washington Post reported. Warren’s legislation has little chance of Senate passage and was quickly criticized by business groups and white-collar defense attorneys as criminalizing normal corporate behavior. “Criminal penalties are the most drastic penalties a government can impose. We need to be very careful about how we use that,” said Tom Quaadman, executive vice president of the Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a large lobbying group. There may be faster ways to address the difficulty of prosecuting corporate titans, some defense attorneys said. “A better legislative response would be to give the [Securities and Exchange Commission] the budget it needs to do its job,” said Stephen Crimmins, a former SEC enforcement lawyer who is a partner at Murphy & McGonigle.
