If Corporations Are People, They Should Be Subject to the Death Penalty

The Southern Pacific Railroad Company triumphed over Santa Clara, California in a legal battle over 130 years ago. This victory set a precedent that applied the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to corporations, a concept known as "corporate personhood." Today, this antiquated principle empowers tech giants to disregard government regulations, mining private data, denying healthcare, defying health initiatives, and wielding tremendous influence in elections.

Supreme Court rulings favoring corporations overwhelmingly due to this concept. Yet, if corporations are indeed people - a status upheld in several US states subject to the death penalty - should not corporations convicted of egregious crimes face capital punishment? The concept of a corporate death penalty, or "judicial dissolution," traces its roots back to 1887 when 17 sugar refineries formed a monopoly, which was later dissolved by a New York Supreme Court for abusing its corporate charter.

This precedent laid the foundation for US anti-trust law, demonstrating the potential power a single state could exert to protect citizens from corporate harm. The presiding judge emphasized that corporations' lives are indeed shorter than those of ordinary citizens. However, the use of this corporate death penalty has been scarce since then, with no publicly traded company failing due to conviction between 2001 and 2010.

As tech firms dominate data collection, compile private information akin to the NSA, and enable genocide through social media platforms like Facebook, bringing back the corporate death penalty seems timely. Although the conservative US Supreme Court is unlikely to support this idea, corporations could face additional judicial pressure.