this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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I think RICO is a white collar equivalent to the concept of felony murder, although maybe not a 1-to-1.
You get a harsher penalty by basically being involved/contributing in a large operation.
They're not really equivalent. With RICO if you've committed multiple times of crimes from a certain list, and those crimes are related to an "enterprise" you can be charged with racketeering.
You're not being charged with crimes someone else did. You're being charged with masterminding a bunch of crimes. RICO charges are used against people at the head of an organization. Felony Murder is used against people who have the bad luck to be part of a group when someone else in the group pulls the trigger.
RICO goes after the organization in organized crime. It fills in a gap in the laws that maybe wasn't there already, because none of the other laws went after the planning and organizing of the crimes. Felony murder seems to just exist to pile additional charges on someone who had already committed crimes that were already on the books, and make that person additionally responsible for the actions of a different person.
Actually by your definition I think RICO fits really well, RICO is for anyone who participated in the criminal enterprise (so not just the leaders of the organization) and to my understanding it is primarily to trump up charges against them to hold them accountable for the crimes of the organization.
That being said in general we don't really go after the secondary effects of white collar crime the same way we do with violent crime.
You have it right but the part in parenthesis is backwards. It was originally used because we were only capable of prosecuting those who personally committed the crimes. We could not charge people who directed those things or paid for those things until RICO. It then followed though that you could use it in the reverse, like what you said, so you aren't wrong.