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Volkswagen Executive Sentenced To Maximum Prison Term For His Role In Dieselgate (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Wednesday, a U.S. District judge in Detroit sentenced Oliver Schmidt, a former Volkswagen executive, to seven years in prison for his role in the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal of 2015. Schmidt was also ordered to pay a criminal penalty of $400,000, according to a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) press release. The prison term and the fine together represent the maximum sentence that Schmidt could have received under the plea deal he signed in August. Schmidt, a German citizen who lived in Detroit as an emissions compliance executive for VW, was arrested in Miami on vacation last January. In August, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy and to making a false statement under the Clean Air Act. Schmidt's plea deal stated that the former executive could face up to seven years in prison and between $40,000 and $400,000 in fines.
Last week, Schmidt's attorneys made a last-minute bid requesting a lighter sentence for Schmidt: 40 months of supervised release and a $100,000 fine. Schmidt also wrote a letter to the judge, which surfaced over the weekend, in which the executive said he felt "misused" by his own company and claimed that higher-ranked VW executives coached him on a script to help him lie to a California Air Resources Board (CARB) official. Instead, Schmidt was sentenced to the maximum penalties outlined in the plea deal. Only one other VW employee has been sentenced in connection with the emissions scandal: former engineer James Liang, who received 40 months in prison and two years of supervised release as the result of his plea deal. Although six other VW Group executives have been indicted, none is in U.S. custody.
Last week, Schmidt's attorneys made a last-minute bid requesting a lighter sentence for Schmidt: 40 months of supervised release and a $100,000 fine. Schmidt also wrote a letter to the judge, which surfaced over the weekend, in which the executive said he felt "misused" by his own company and claimed that higher-ranked VW executives coached him on a script to help him lie to a California Air Resources Board (CARB) official. Instead, Schmidt was sentenced to the maximum penalties outlined in the plea deal. Only one other VW employee has been sentenced in connection with the emissions scandal: former engineer James Liang, who received 40 months in prison and two years of supervised release as the result of his plea deal. Although six other VW Group executives have been indicted, none is in U.S. custody.
after they architected the 2008 financial crisis, but when they see a bit of extra emissions they claim damages of tens of billions of dollars and put people in jail. The EU should arrest American bankers at any opportunity, to show that the EU can play the same dirty games.
The big fish lose their jobs, but go home to their families and retire in style on their past compensation.
Same old same old. We saw in the US after the financial crash of 2008.
Ford and GM bought and used the same cheat device. Why are they not being brought up on the same charges?
How much environmental damage did this cause? Quantify it. If you're going to assert that he should be killed for his crime, you should be able to identify exactly what his crime was.
sig: sauer
So they cheated, and got punished. But let's be honest. The emissions limits are arbitrary bureaucratic numbers. Giving prison time and huge fines is just another way for the government to say we own your ass, from cradle to grave, no matter if we change the rules, no matter where the line is.
The US is a dictatorship run by bureaucrats and prosecutors. And you are a slave. Doesn't matter which party is in power, doesn't matter who is president, the state rules you. The laws are just a way to snap you back to their version of reality.
I'd like to believe otherwise....but the millions living in US prisons is closing in on the number put into German work camps, prison camps, and extermination camps.
So, are you saying NOX is a greenhouse gas then? Or perhaps it is the particulate matter (soot) in the exhaust?
Maybe this was about clean air and not Global Warming?
No.. All pollution results in global warming now.. It's the standard scare tactic used to strike fear in the unknowing and those who don't pay attention.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
As per this one.
Oliver Schmidt, who was general manager of the engineering and environmental office for VW of America
A regional department manager is not a senior executive. Most sources, including the one /. chose, attempt to imply he was a C*O of VP of something, to make the audience think something meaningful and unprecedented has happened. This guy is middle management. Geographically significant middle management, but in a global company, that's still just middle management.
Germany, and by extension Europe, has over the last decades tried very hard to project an image of a decent, honest, open, rule-bound democracy with integrity, good laws, yada yada yada. Listening to the Germans and Europeans in general, you'd think that its always the U.S. Corporations that are doing horrible things in the name of profit. This has been used very, very successfully to mask the fact that German and other powerful European companies are incredibly aggressive when it comes to making money/profit, especially in developing world markets where they are very strong, and there are no rules for them to play by. Its not just German companies either. The French, Belgians, Dutch and so forth aren't any better. If there is money to be grabbed, they'll grab it, decency and rules be damned. So its not just VW and the other automakers that are doing this sort of stuff. This is a system problem in a European Union that seems "super decent" image-wise, but is anything but in reality. Also, there is no way the German and other European governments didn't know this kind of cheating was happening. They knew, but turned a blind eye to it until there was no hiding it anymore.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
The political left has put itself in a bad position. On one hand it supposedly stands against pollution, and wants to end climate change. Yet on the other hand, we see the exact same people overtly supporting overpopulation in terrible third-world locales like Africa, the Middle East, and India.
Like nearly all consumer-grade vehicles, the vehicles affected by this problem have a limited lifespan due to them being actively used. Perhaps 5 to 10 years in most cases. They'll be replaced soon enough, and any unexpected pollution they may cause will no longer be an issue.
That's not the case when it comes to people. Even in places where the life expectancy is relatively low, it's very typical for a human who survives childhood to live until they're 40 to 60 years old. During this time span, which far exceeds that of a typical vehicle, these humans will consume massive amounts of food and energy, will likely use decades of petrol-powered vehicles of one sort or another, and will generate massive amounts of waste. And we shouldn't forget that these people will in turn likely reproduce 4 to 7 times, exacerbating the environmental impact again and again.
We're currently seeing huge population growth in many regions within Africa, along with the Middle East, and even India to some extent. The birth rates in such areas are far beyond any sustainable level, given how resource-constrained these areas are to begin with. That's why we're already seeing so many of these people flood into civilized areas like Europe and even the Americas.
While they're making a huge fuss over a relatively minor issue with these vehicle emissions, the political left is going out of its way to simultaneously encourage the totally unsustainable population growth in third-world areas. This population growth will cause far more environmental damage than these vehicle emissions.
It's like the political left has their priorities completely backward. They're focused on some of the least-significant and short-term environmental issues, while actively contributing to much larger and more disastrous long-term environmental destruction.
How much environmental damage did this cause? Quantify it. If you're going to assert that he should be killed for his crime, you should be able to identify exactly what his crime was.
To expect a random slashdotter to quantify it is unreasonable. Luckily someone has done part of the work, however. 29,000 years of life lost or 4.1 billion Euros of damage. Based on a European average life expectancy of 80.2 years that's equivalent to killing a bit over 361 people.
In the USA the pollution is probably more distributed but, due to worse public health, life is shorter at around 78.88 so it's probably something around 300 people (equivalent) killed. Looking around VoX estimates it at about 5-27 additional deaths per year, so over e.g. a 10 year car lifetime that's getting close to the 300 number.
Now, this actually only quantifies the environmental impact on people and ignores e.g. the health of wild animals that live next to roads, so it provides a very minimal lower bound. Still it shows that the environmental impact can be real and serious.
My first thought when I read this was, 7 years for a little pollution but nothing for the crooked bankers that sent the US economy into the toilet in 2008 and then made billions more on the way out.
How much environmental damage did this cause? Quantify it. If you're going to assert that he should be killed for his crime, you should be able to identify exactly what his crime was.
This seems like a silly argument. Sort of like telling the traffic court judge that you didn't kill anyone or cause any property damage, so the running the red light ticket should be dismissed. And asking for quantification of the damage? How many significant digits would you require?
The US government isn't the bad guy here. It's mostly on the Volkswagen top executives that asked the scapegoats to lie to protect the higher-ups. Note that the lying was never intended to protect the company but only the executives. It's also somewhat on the scapegoats who agreed to lie even though it was disingenuous of them to believe that they had anything positive to gain by breaking the law.
The numbers smell like BS. They are based on a theoretical model that predicts 1200 premature deaths, yet they don't cite a single instance of an actual death that can traced back to any actions taken by VW.
I havent heard this, source please?
Well, in the grand scheme of things he is not significant but he was one of the few people the US authorities could get their hands on. The US authorities have filed charges against the higher ups, but Germany will not extradite a citizen to the US over this.
What happened is that this guy made the monumentally stupid decision to go on a vacation to the US, probably thinking that he would be safe because he is no big fish.
...is acquitted.
some jail time for the environutters that predicated all of the anti-car and anti-jobs regulations on this little white lie being true.
How many times in the last decade have Democrats (especially Dems, though not exclusively) been telling us that "all the carmakers support 50MPG CAFE" as "proof" that their environmental regulations weren't bonkers.
Notice Germany and the EU hasn't done a damn thing. And no, "fines" don't count. These people all have plenty of money. Shame on the EU.
2500 - 3000 kg SUV emits more CO2 that a 1300 kg Volkswagen due to the Newton's second law of motion: F = m*a, i.e. Force (fuel) = mass * acceleration
Penalties for white collar crime. Too many time it is just a slap on the wrist.
Because penalties proportional to damage aren't part of the culture/strategy. It's just not what they do for crimes in general, and there's no reason for this particular crime to be treated exceptionally, i.e. differently from any other mass murder.
Ford and GM bought and used the same cheat device.
Bullcrap. Ford and GM don't even make diesel cars, and vans and trucks don't have to meet the same emissions standards. There is no reason for them to cheat, since they aren't even in the game.
How much environmental damage did this cause?
Little or none. The result of the cheating was not more pollution, just different pollution. More particulates, but less CO2. There was no known way to make their engines clean enough to pass the test while still making them reasonably efficient.
A co-worker of mine used to be in senior management at VW DE (left more than a decade ago), and he said that the whole thing was utterly unsurprising to him. He said the US management was the worst cross between lickspittle toadies focused only on their personal ladder-climbing and soulless used car salesman willing to say anything regardless of facts.
-Styopa
Although six other VW Group executives have been indicted, none is in U.S. custody.
If they downloaded a crappy song, a SWAT team would have picked them up ages ago.
"And is THAT raindrop, the one that caused the flood and killed your family, here in the court room today?" He asked the witness...
Luckily someone has done part of the work, however.
Right. And from your own link:
The researchers estimate
That's not a very scientific way to measure death, especially if you're trying to get a jury to recommend capital punishment.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
There was no known way to make their engines clean enough to pass the test while still making them reasonably efficient.
DEF.
That's, to put it simply, moronic. Exceptionally so.
Unless you've been secretly tracking every photon in the universe, an estimate is the most precise possible answer.
And for example, if somebody is sentenced to death for murder, it isn't based on having been able to measure the exact amount of harm that they have done. Indeed, at the sentencing there are likely to be numerous impacted persons who give a statement on the harm that the person's death caused them; and their own accounts are stories are merely estimates. They have no way of knowing all the impacts it will have on their future. And what about all the things the person who died will no longer be able to do? You don't know all the things they would have done with the rest of their life, and the impact it would have on others.
Stop being a fucking moron, and start thinking with your brain instead of trying to think using your conclusions.
You'd have to have uploaded it to manage criminal infringement, downloading doesn't cut it.
Said nobody ever. What the hell do you think the EcoBlue engine is they've been advertising everywhere? Diesel!
Only currently used in vans, and not in the USA.
this cost real money. Worse, there's going to be decades of increased oversight that will cost even more. Somewhere is a billionaire who's net worth is now slightly less. That is not something we stand for in the world. Blood had to be spilled. I'm surprised we stopped here.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Suck it up, buttercup...
No, it's a counter to a silly bleeding heart who's calling for the death penalty. I know it's en vogue to hate anyone who would harm mother Gaia so, but calling for his death is asinine.
sig: sauer
Yay for coerced false confession! American Gulag FTW!
It's not at all analogous to running a red light. Running a red light creates a probabilistic bifurcation - a chance that someone will suffer dire or fatal consequences if you run a red light. Exceeding emissions standards raises the average pollution levels (unless you're standing directly behind the vehicle and taking deep breaths of its fumes)
To address GP, the environmental damage varied by vehicle model year. Some of the older vehicles were especially egregious in exceeding the EPA and CARB standards. But the 2015 vehicles were actually within EPA limits and just barely exceeded CARB limits. In particular, the emissions were under the EPA/CARB limits in previous years, and (for the large part) within EU limits (they have much more lax diesel emissions standards than the U.S., while the U.S. uses the same limits for both gas and diesel).
But that is not the point. You can argue that the limits are arbitrary or unnecessarily low. But the venue for making that argument is in the political arena - by electing the politicians who help decide those limits and/or sending them letters/phone calls expressing your opinion, or voting out the politicians who enacted the law. Once those limits are codified into law, it is the responsibility of citizens and companies to abide by the law even if you disagree with it. The only time violating the law in protest of it (civil disobedience) is justified is when all political avenues of protesting the law have been cut off or rendered ineffective.
Its good seeing justice serviced... Now how about arresting bankers?
So, you are saying the jury was wrong?
This sentence doesn't even count as a slap on the wrist and nowhere near does serves justice for the damage done. The sentence is roughly that of a single violent crime like a store burglary but this crime harmed society a million-fold worse than petty crime. This was a crime on a global scale that literally harmed the planet itself. Justice should be proportionate to the damage done. In this case, life without parole should be the minimal option. The "fine" here is surely less than this person earned during the same period. And this person's sentence will have them out in 3 years. This is not justice! This is a system that doesn't recognize the impact of the crime. A new category of crime is needed. I propose "megacrimes".
Zero. The cheat causes a bit more NOx, but also less CO2. For climate change, it's probably a net benefit.
Ford and GM don't even make diesel cars
So in your mind, who makes all those diesel Fords and (until very recently) Opels with diesel engines? The elfs?
Ford and GM have been making diesel cars for decades and it is well documented that both are amongst the worst offenders in terms of real-world NOx emissions. Their defeat devices are the subject of official investigations in multiple countries.
NOx, not particulates. The affected engines have exceptionally low particulate emissions, except when running in test mode. Then they have higher (but still permissible in the USA) particulate emissions, but much lower NOx. Without SCR (AdBlue application), there is a tradeoff between NOx and essentially everything else.
The US (and California even more so) has very strict NOx limits, but rather lax standards for other emissions, so passing the test is relatively easy if you cheat. However, using low-NOx mode all the time would clog up the engine because of all the additional soot. So they 'found a way around that problem'.
In Europe, the entire car industry has been caught doing this kind of thing. Unfortunately, most of it is probably legal due to a loophole. Defeat devices are permitted if they serve to protect the engine.
VW is a scapegoat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal . Has anybody asked why are all carmakers breaking these limits? Perhaps it's not so wise to draw a new environmental standard without checking what engines are currently physically possible and practical? There has been very little fact checking in this all and too much mindless green rage.
Did you know a safe way to be "green" and sleep peacefully is to simply buy a big truck with much higher absolute emissions? Just because it weighs much more and the limits are calculated based on that ...
VW were the only car company stupid enough to publicly admit everything. Winterkorn thought coming clean would reduce the consequences. He was wrong.
EU limits aren't laxer for diesels, they're just different. Diesels are allowed ba bit more NOx, petrols are allowed a bit more CO and organic compounds. Both have limits that take into account the relative strengths and weaknesses of the respective technologies.
The US has only one set of regulations for all types of engines, probably for historic reasons, though I suspect a bit of protectionism is behind it as well, since diesel cars in the US are mostly made by non-US companies.
How does that compare to the emissions and environmental harm caused by flying thousands of delegates and bureaucrats to some distant city where they haggle for months in luxurious surroundings over the next environmental protocol/accord/agreement/framework that will be totally ignored by everyone else?
Quite a bit more. Still, please stop trying to use that as an excuse to justify the bureaucrats.
I worked in a manipulative lobbyist think tank.
Free will is such a ridiculous delusion. ALL our behavior is the result of sensory input being mangled by the accumulation of all previous input, which includes epigenes and genes.
People can do what they want, but they can't *want* what they want. But their environment can do something to make them want something!
The more confident somebody is to be free from this, the *easier* it actually is, to do it. Because they are blind to it.
Most childhood memories happened either vastly different or didn't happen at all! Because every time th brain gets input, all the memories are slightly altered too.
It is rather easy, if you are in a position with as much power as a parent or a boss of a media company, to make people see and remember exactly what you want them to see or remember, and then act based on that.
So no, even if you decided to write this comment, that does not mean you were in control at all.
And neither does Schmith have to have been in control. He's simply the last link in the chain (or rather tree/graph), when the entire chain was the cause.
Looking at the peer pressure he received, he was probably less than 20% free. The rest came to him via his chain of command above him.
He wasn't German, or American, or anything. He was *corporate*.
Of a psychopathic international corporation, to be precise.
No matter where you are from, if you happen to be a psychopath, a high position in corporate is the natural place you will end up.
How much environmental damage did this cause? Quantify it. If you're going to assert that he should be killed for his crime, you should be able to identify exactly what his crime was.
I don't know how valuable these numbers really are, but the argument could thus be made that you'd have to kill him fifty-nine times to "make up" (take revenge) for just the number of people who have lost their lives in the USA alone.
Of course, he isn't wholly responsible; what share of the responsibility do we assign to this person? How can we determine what percentage of the blame he bears?
No amount of killing people, even the guilty, will bring anyone back from the dead. I would argue that the correct "penalty" (remedy) for VW diesel cheating killing people is that VW should now have to save people from dying. There are surely identifiable people whose lives could be saved if only more money were spent on them. VW should be forced to spend that money, and what's more, they should have to save more lives than they have taken. Whether threefold or tenfold, the "punishment" (justice) should benefit society more than making a handful of people serve as an object lesson.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
it's about theor gains.
I say if they want this reality-contradicting
newspeak, they have to have ALL of it.
That means eating up another corporation is cannibalism and brutal murder, and the entire corporation comes under state-domination, and is separated from economy for a life sentence.
Let's see how that tastes!
I don't know how valuable these numbers really are, but the argument could thus be made that you'd have to kill him fifty-nine times [jalopnik.com] to "make up" (take revenge) for just the number of people who have lost their lives in the USA alone.
That's extremely shoddy science though. The estimates are based (largely) on indirect PM2.5 due to additional NOx emitted above the limit the cars were certified for, but they fail to account for the fact that the affected engines also emit far less PM2.5 directly than the emission limit allows. If you would account for both, the end result would very likely be a negative number of deaths.
Let's just do a scoping exercise;
1) Is the company at fault a foreign brand?
2) Is the alleged perpetrator foreign, or have a foreign sounding name, or better still a foreign accent?
???
4) Throw the book at him, and possibly make up a few extra books to ensure you really do get him
For what it's worth, the EU hasn't (yet) done too much about this, so it seems they too use much the same score sheet. You'll also note that the same is true of bankers in those two regions too. Something to think about before taking that job to "take our company International", isn't it!?
How many people will die from climate change that this contributed to? I suspect the answer is a lot of people will. Why isn't the penalty proportional, something like being executed?
Are you dumb? The diesel engines with this defeat were still more energy efficient than gasoline engines. The effect of making it impossible for diesel engines to pass emissions is to push the industry to gasoline (or maybe coal-electric).
How about everybody calling for death because of the cheat be sentenced to death for not understanding thermodynamics and advocating for more fuel consumption and oil wars? How many people will die from oil wars? Or, not because that kind of talk is simply insane.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Only currently used in vans, and not in the USA.
Lemme guess, you live in an inner city and none of your effete neighbors have a Duramax/3500?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Those cars are not sold in the United States, so no charges were brought against them for violating US law.
There was no "environmental damage". It was enormously inflated, and absolutely insignificant to other sources of pollution, on any level from highly localized to global. Issue inflated, to literally steal tens of billions of dollars from a foreign manufacturer.
Trump should go to jail instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions
How much did he make in salary and stock options since the start of his lies?
7 years and TRIPLE damage should be the right amount.
Give me enough money and 7 years in jail works out to a good deal.
The ones who profited the most, are the ones who should be penalized the most.
To whom much is given, much shall be expected.
It takes a special kind of cognitive malfunction to claim that these cars caused people deaths/shortened lives while ignoring the much greater number of people's lives that were saved/extended by these cars making it possible to go to grocery stores and jobs.
When everybody has their own personal farm in their backyard that produces all the food and medicine they need to survive, then we can talk about eliminating motor vehicles. Until then, I'd say this is all just Agenda 21 efforts to put another choke point on the proletariat class of the human population so that the elite will have more unreachable land and fresh air for their offspring to enjoy riding ponies on.
The estimates are based (largely) on indirect PM2.5 due to additional NOx emitted above the limit the cars were certified for, but they fail to account for the fact that the affected engines also emit far less PM2.5 directly than the emission limit allows. If you would account for both, the end result would very likely be a negative number of deaths.
By all means, show your numbers. My point stands, there's no benefit to killing anybody over anything like this.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
if somebody is sentenced to death for murder, it isn't based on having been able to measure the exact amount of harm that they have done. Indeed, at the sentencing there are likely to be numerous impacted persons who give a statement on the harm that the person's death caused them
Actually, you're wrong again. A conviction for murder requires the court of law to prove the amount of harm done, namely the end of the life of the murder victim. The victim impact statements are given by family and friends of the murder victim only because the murder victim cannot deliver them. When was the last time you've seen a third party give a victim statement in a robbery case?
Stop being a fucking moron, and start thinking with your brain instead of trying to think using your conclusions.
I would gladly hold that mirror on front of you. When it comes to criminal justice, a simple estimate is not sufficient. Expert testimony may help sway the jury based on an expert's opinion on likelihoods (like in the case of DNA evidence), but I simple let-me-put-my-finger-in-the-air-and-provide-an-estimate will not cut it.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Nope. I wasn't wrong, you just didn't understand the literal meaning of the words I used. That's not even my fault.
You don't comprehend the meaning of the word exact, for example. This renders your analysis moot; you're arguing against different things than the things I said.
you just didn't understand the literal meaning of the words I used.
Oh, I understand your words quite well. The literal meaning of the word 'moron', which you wrote, is an indication of groteske disrespect.
I guess I fell for the good ol' trap of arguing with someone who would drag me down to their level and beat me with experience.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.