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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.
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, 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
None of the bigger fish involved have been stupid enough to step on US soil
Yea, the guys at the top know better than to get caught. What happens is the CYA chain ends some point below them and the hapless subordinate gets left holding the bag because he sacrificed his ethics to meet his employer's demands and didn't think though things far enough to realize he'd be holding the bag.
The moral of the story is to ALWAYS act ethically and legally and never demand your subordinates do anything less either. If your management team requests that you do anything else, demand a written order before complying and keep the original signed copy in a safe place. If they demand you order your subordinates to violate this rule, make them give the order themselves...
On another note, if you find yourself collecting CYA documents, you might brush off that Resume and get out of dodge. You don't want to work for unethical people very long because they may be setting you up as the scapegoat. Don't give them a chance.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
You'd have to have uploaded it to manage criminal infringement, downloading doesn't cut it.
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.
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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!
Everywhere that's not China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea is America soil. The universal Empire asserts universal jurisdiction for its cruel laws and contemptible kangaroo courts.
Don't like it? Go argue with the Air Force. Be sure to bring along your own air force.
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.
So, you are saying the jury was wrong?
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.
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.
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.'"
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)
ALWAYS act ethically and legally and never demand your subordinates do anything less either. If your management team requests that you do anything else, demand a written order before complying
A written order will do nothing for you. If you break the law, it's your responsibility.
Just say no. Escalate to your company legal team, and require them to confirm in writing that the proposed action is legal. Even then, consider whether you really want to be explaining this to a jury.
You can always get another job.
True.... I will amend my advice in the future.
Don't knowingly break the law.
Though the problem here is that usually things are couched in shades of grey. What you are being asked to do may not be technically illegal, but may be perceived as such after the fact. One needs to understand *exactly* where the boundaries are and stay clear of them.
At one time, I worked for a company that was "re-engineering" a customer's product to make it their own. They implemented a new product that did exactly the same thing and then some. When I was discussing the legal ramifications of this with management, I expressed my deep misgivings about this. We had been paid to write the previous customer's product and where living off charging them to support it. What we where doing amounted to stealing the ideas, even if we where doing development at our own expense with different developers and if I was the customer and I found out about this I'd be upset. Lucky for me, they didn't make me work on the project and I was able to bail on them before it all hit the fan. It was a nasty legal fight..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.