In a landmark case, the owner of Peanut Corp of America has been sentenced in Georgia to nearly 30 years in prison for knowingly selling tainted peanut-butter that sickened hundreds and killed nine.
Stewart Parnell, 61, was also found guilty of fudging lab tests in 2009 that had revealed deadly salmonella contamination throughout his GA processing plant.
Federal investigators found the rundown facility infested to the rafters with vermin and pestilence -- the kind of unwholesome environment just rife for breeding food-borne diseases, they said.
Defendant Parnell is the first such executive in American jurisprudence to be criminally prosecuted and severely punished for his corporate malfeasance, albeit not the only high-level exec to profit by deliberately ignoring consumer safety and protections.
To date, however, no other crooked industry-head has ever received a jail sentence that comes anywhere near the 28-year one that Stewart Parnell was handed down this week.
“It should be enough to send a message to the other manufacturers that this is not going to be tolerated anymore, and they had better inspect their food,” said one man whose mother died in the salmonella outbreak.
Two other of Parnell’s colleagues were also tried and sentenced, in a case that U.S. prosecutors are calling “a landmark, with implications that will resonate not just in the food industry but in corporate boardrooms across the country.”
We, the people, certainly hope so.
@EponymousRox
#PoisonPeanutCorp #SalmonellaSentencing
