Prosecutor outlines homicide case against Big Oil

 

As climate-fueled disasters kill thousands of Americans each year, state and local prosecutors have a strong case to charge major oil companies with homicide, a new report argues. 

Last summer, an unusually long and brutal heat wave killed hundreds of people in Maricopa County, Ariz. — “far more than all the murders the county experienced that year,” former federal prosecutor Cindy Cho wrote on Wednesday.  

These deaths ranged from homeless to wealthy; elderly people at home to a 31-year old engineer who died on a hike. And while tragic, Cho argued that these deaths were not accidental, but the result of reckless action by a clear perpetrator: The fossil fuel industry.  

The memo, which Cho prepared for civil society group Public Citizen, comes on the heels of a push by Congressional Democrats for federal prosecution of oil companies for alleged price fixing and what Democrats view as their role in covering up the climate crisis — something that one former federal prosecutor told Congress was analogous to criminal racketeering by the tobacco industry.  

But whatever decision federal prosecutors make, Cho argued, local prosecutors like those in Maricopa County — home of Phoenix — have their own clear pathway for prosecution. ...more