ABSTRACT
On August 10, 1978, three teenage girls perished when a rear-end collision caused their Ford Pinto to burst into flames. As we know, this was not the first time a crash had tragically claimed the lives of a group of youths; nor were these girls the first victims of a Pinto-related fire. Yet the teenagers’ deaths were unique in the legal reactions they evoked. Scarcely a month after the accident, an Indiana grand jury indicted Ford Motor Company on three charges of reckless homicide, and a local prosecutor embarked on a vigorous crusade to see that Ford paid for its alleged “crime.” Indeed, in 1980, Ford’s subsequent criminal trial earned national headlines and riveted the attention of all serious students of white-collar crime and corporate ethics. To this day, it remains a landmark legal case-one that has much to teach us about why attempts to criminalize business violence succeed and fail.
