Deny. Defend. Depose: A New Model of Corporate Accountability?

Deny. Defend. Depose: A New Model of Corporate Accountability?

Here’s a spicy one to cap off the semester. For anyone who is still paying attention, here is my manifesto- err, rambling thoughts on why the people celebrating Brain Thompson’s murder are not entirely horrible or irrational.

A very wise creative writing teacher once told me that the most interesting part of a car wreck is not in the wreckage but in the reactions of the witnesses, bystanders, responders, etc. The wreckage itself is a mere physical fact, but the reactions of people can tell us what the wreckage means. In the wake of Brian Thompson’s murder, one of the questions we should be asking ourselves is why the killing of a CEO has risen to such prominence in the media and public discourse (even law students at the end of a semester have found time to weigh in on it, after all).

In terms of its physical facts, the death of Brian Thompson is unremarkable by American standards. If Thompson had been one of the American children that had died in school shootings in 2024, we likely would not have even learned his name. Instead, his death would have been reported as part of an overall tally or body count, a type of media mass-grave. The cultural relevance of shootings seems to lie in both its tragic nature and as a recurring platform for debating gun rights and accessibility versus mental health and extremism. The cultural relevance of a CEO slaying is… what?

Despite the banality of the physical facts, the CEO slaying has drawn tremendous amounts of cultural and media attention. An interesting comparison can be drawn between the deaths of Thompson and Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate who died in the Titan submersible explosion in June 2023. Unlike the Thompson killing, the physical facts of Rush’s death were truly remarkable. However, the responses from bystanders have been similar. The five submersible deaths dominated the media’s attention, resulting in a lack of attention to the capsizing of the Adriana and the deaths of over 600 migrants. Both deaths have been the subject of starkly divided public opinion. The Rush death was called a tragedy by some and poetic justice by others, whereas the disagreement around Thompson is whether he was the victim of a cold-blooded murder or the subject of vigilante justice.

Another relevant point of comparison is how people react to police killings. The most obvious example is the murder of George Floyd, which sparked the Black Lives Matter movement and protests. Unlike the deaths of CEOs, police violence is something that vacillates between the background and foreground of media and public attention but is always present to some degree. That said, only rare cases have an enduring presence in the public conscience. In America, the names ‘George Floyd’ and ‘Rodney King’ loom large (the case of Rodney King was not a killing but was closely related to the use of lethal force by police against Black people). A Canadian example is the killing of Robert Dziekanski by four RCMP officers at the Vancouver airport.

My proposed explanation for the similarities and differences in treatment is that these various deaths engage with our desire for justice but in different ways. School shootings, police violence, and corporatism are all seen as problems by large segments of the public but have no easy solutions. School shootings and police violence are seen as problems demanding a response, both against individual perpetrators and through broader means, such as public policy or changes in culture. Conversely, the deaths of CEOs actually seem to be hailed as a solution to injustice by some.

I think that this speaks to how deeply the sentiment of corporations having no accountability runs. The premise underlying the Occupy Wallstreet movement was that the 1% were in a position where they would make huge profits by making good decisions but the costs of their bad decisions were borne by the 99%. There are also huge problems when it comes to assigning criminal liability to corporations, meaning that corporations are rarely held morally accountable under the law. The rule of law tells us that all people are equal under the law, but given how frequently corporations (legal persons) are seen to escape any form of accountability, they appear to operate above the law.

When people do not trust the legal system to constrain corporations, then it is rational to desire for justice to come from another source. In the case of Rush, that source was poetic justice. Rush replicated the exact same same hubris that the builders of the Titanic had in the way he constructed and operated the Titan submersible.

But is hubris so wrong? The tale of Icarus warns us about hubris by showing the consequences of descending to close to the realm of the gods. But Icarus’ fall was a natural moral consequence of a fatal flaw arising out of human frailty; we are supposed to learn from it, not celebrate it. However, the difference here is that Icarus suffered the consequences of his actions, whereas the outcome of corporate hubris is often that it ends up becoming an externality (especially when they are “too big to fail”). Rush’s death was a rare instance the CEO, the figurehead of the corporation, suffered the direct consequences of corporate hubris. When Rush died, people were not cheering the death of a modern-day Icarus; they were celebrating a rare instance of corporate accountability. 

In the case of Brian Thompson, the alternative source of justice (perhaps Luigi Mangione’s defence lawyers can borrow this phrase to come up with a new legal defence for murder?) was simply good-old-fashioned vigilante justice. No Greek myth is needed to explain why some people are cheering Thompson’s death: he was (it is alleged) an asshole of such magnitude that he deserved to die.

I am not saying that the people who are cheering on Thompson’s death are right to do so, only that there is some rational basis for it. To me, as a law student, the significance of how people react to the deaths of CEOs is about how corporate law fits into our overall legal system, especially the rule of law. If so many people are celebrating the deaths of CEOs because they do not believe that justice can be done through the law, that undermines the rule of law, which requires people to respect the law as legitimate. It is telling that the words engraved on Mangione’s bullets were about legal procedure and are related to how insurance companies weaponize legal procedure against vulnerable people. That is an important ethical consideration for anyone going into business law.