GETTING OFF EASY IN TOBACCO LAND

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Three young people in Florida, barely out of their teens, have just been sentenced to 15 years each for removing a stop sign from an intersection. The defendants sobbed, and even the judge evinced regret, but everyone seems to agree that stealing stop signs is a particularly heinous prank. In this case, three other young people were killed when they drove through the signless intersection into an eight-ton Mack truck.

Now, suppose these three miscreants had done something else. Suppose that they had removed stop signs at not just one but 133,333 intersections annually, resulting in three deaths per intersection, or 400,000 dead drivers and passengers a year. Suppose further that they had not only removed the stop signs but also replaced them with go signs or, better yet, billboards advertising how cool it is to zip heedlessly through intersections without being bothered by irritating, petty-minded, governmental instructions. In fact, make those very attractive billboards featuring yellow-slickered cowboys or a suave camel named Joe. Then what do you think the sentence would have been?

Well, if the kind of judicial reasoning that applies to tobacco companies also applied to stop-sign cases, then the three witless young vandals would have faced a stiff fine and been forced to downsize the cowboy and put the camel out to pasture. But there would be no talk about prison terms; in fact, Congress would be considering legislation to bar any such vengefulness on the part of the courts. If the youths were fortunate enough to be a tobacco company, they might even find themselves rewarded for their crime with immunity from future class-action suits brought by the relatives of deceased drivers. They would be encouraged to take their act overseas and start focusing on signs saying HALT or ARRET.

You don't have to be a Floridian to find instructive contrasts to the proposed tobacco settlement. In Oklahoma earlier this year, a 38-year-old father of three was sentenced to 93 years for growing marijuana in his basement. (That's 70 years for possession alone.) Which suggests that the best strategy for legalizing marijuana might be to criminalize tobacco--and then just wait for the sentences for possession of smokable substances to drop, say, from 93 years in prison to 10 minutes of community service.

To be fair, there are some big differences between the stop-sign case and the tobacco settlement. Smokers know they're risking their life and their health; it says so on the cigarette pack, right near "tasteful/low tar" or some similarly enticing inscription. In contrast, the three teens killed at the intersection didn't have a clue about the missing sign. No one has ever declared a willingness to "walk a mile" to go through an unmarked intersection or congratulated herself for having "come a long way" when she got to one. But to continue in the vein of fairness, it is also true that the stop-sign thieves had throughout their young lives neglected to contribute to any major political campaign. Anyone contemplating a thoughtless act that might end up costing people their life should take a tip from the tobacco companies and start bankrolling politicians who might be sympathetic to their cause.

There is another way the three Florida vandals went wrong: they failed to incorporate before committing their dastardly act. According to a fateful 1886 Supreme Court decision, corporations are persons, entitled like anyone else to freedom of speech, even when they use it to promote the widespread consumption of a poisonous substance. They are not, however, persons who can be lethally injected or attached to a chain gang, no matter how wicked their crimes. In 1996, for example, Rockwell International was found guilty of causing an explosion that killed two company scientists. Pfizer manufactured a defective heart valve that caused 360 deaths worldwide. In all these cases, hefty fines were levied and stern statements were made, but no executive or plant manager spent so much as a night in the slammer.

The lesson from these cases, as well as from the tobacco settlement, is that that mysterious masked entity known as a corporation is in fact an ingenious device for collectivizing responsibility. Even when a corporation is found guilty, no actual individual need take the fall. But if the defense lawyer for a mere biological person attempts a similar diffusion of blame--by, for example, pointing out the defendant's history of abuse as a child, or the fact that several upstanding citizens had noticed the missing stop sign and failed to report it--said lawyer can expect these days to be laughed out of court.

So here's another tip for anyone contemplating the old stop-sign prank: don't do the sign removing yourself. Call yourself Superior Sign Relocation Inc., and hire others to do the manual labor so you can always point proudly to your contribution as a pillar of the economy and a creator of jobs. And if you wonder how you'll make the money to meet payroll, that's easy: you'll sell the purloined signs, of course, to the millions of homeowners who, like so many of my law-abiding, homeowning neighbors, favor them as decorations for their basement wet bars.