Edit: They made a minor settlement and there was a lawsuit that got a tiny amount of press.
http://time.com/42322/steve-jobs-chilling-response-after-get...
Edit 2: there was not even a slap on the wrist legally speaking:
"The proposed settlement, which if accepted by the court will be in effect for five years, prohibits the companies from engaging in anticompetitive no solicitation agreements. "
Yes it is, see: https://definitions.uslegal.com/c/corporate-immunity/
That said..I agree with the spirit of your post. The only officers that cannot receive corporate immunity are the CEO and CFO - they can be held liable in criminal and civil litigation.
Hypothetically: A person at Apple might not know why they can't hire someone from Google. For all they know it could have been ordered over apple trying to steal Google trade secrets as part of a settlement. Lots of possible reasons why it could be legal. The employee just does not necessarily have the knowledge. So they could make a defense that assumed their employer was acting in good faith.
It's pretty much impossible to prove good faith in the instances of death, and theft. Generally, such things are reserved for governments either through war or (criminal executions) or property seizure. If your employer was the government you may be able to make a good faith defense if it was related to your job and it turns out the government was violating the law.
Also keep mind it's a defense not an immunity. Also the more severe action the harder it is for there to be a lawful reason. There are very few instances were someone could legally kill someone vs not hire someone. It's like orders of magnitude different.
Why aren't those who are tasked with enforcing the law enforcing the law?
That's not true. Just look at Lt. William Calley.
He didn't serve additional time due to other technical issues in his prosecution.
"Howard Callaway, Secretary of the Army, was quoted in The New York Times in 1976 as stating that Calley's sentence was reduced because Calley honestly believed that what he did was a part of his orders—a rationale that contradicts the standards set at Nuremberg and Tokyo, where following orders was not a defense for committing war crimes.[98]"
[98] Marshall, Burke; Goldstein, Joseph (2 April 1976). "Learning From My Lai: A Proposal on War Crimes". The New York Times. p. 26.
Sure sounds like an excuse to me. Now that I think about it, you're not splitting hairs, you're just flat out wrong at best.
So, excusing part of an action due to a coercion to follow actions is valid, but every time we talk about this scenario in the real world you're going to have more options, maybe you doubt your captor would actually shoot both of you - in that case shooting your friend is back to mostly being your decision - the issue occurs when this grey story is converted to black and white and people paint themselves falsely as being unwilling participants. In WW2 US soldiers could have refused when asked to participate in concentration camps, it would have been severely inconveniencing and that counts for something, but they chose the easy route and that is a perfectly valid guilt.
[1] There is a rather sound argument to be made that evil and culpability is a false construct and that we should refuse to punish any bad actors beyond the point of discouraging recidivism. If there is a common good that we all share as a "known truth" then deviations from that truth can be considered to be impairments about seeing the truth and comprehending it which would lead any deviations from that truth to be understood as a need to enlighten their view of the truth. It's quite an interesting philosophical path to head down.
> Guantánamo leadership wanted to understand the legal gymnastics that would be required to implement a program of their own. “Torture has been prohibited by international law, but the language of the statutes is written vaguely,”
and
> Bush Administration lawyers had taken the position that “enemy combatants” could be held indefinitely, without trials, and that in order for something to qualify as “torture” it “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/guantanamos-da...
The United States Senate ratified, and President Reagan signed the The U.N. Convention Against Torture, which states that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”
No amount of legal hand waving by the Bush administration can justify what was done.
Likewise, there is no excuse for the Obama administration refusing to prosecute the crimes that occurred.
As Obama put it, "We tortured some folks."
He just refused to prosecute those guilty of ordering and carrying out that torture, despite our treaty obligation to do so.
In other words, do you really think such people got off easy before the Nuremberg trials? If anything, much worse has happened to them throughout history, because the kings and dictators didn't have to put them through a judicial process.
[1] _sigh_ Oliver North, honestly America... why did you never... eh.
Remember, Guantanamo also had taxi drivers and aid workers in it. How many of them are you willing to torture in order to find the terrorist you've captured and maybe get some information that might help stop a future terrorist plot? The hypothetical of capturing a top general with a tight deadline provides a terrible intuition when it comes to torture.
But that is exactly the kind of intuition Rumsfeld et al wanted people to be thinking about, in order to justify torture^W enhanced interrogation techniques.
> The answer isn't grey, it's black and white. The answer is always YES to doing what it takes to save one's family.
You didn't really need to make such an absolute point, but you did.
Right, so you bring in Hanns Scharff.
1. "Just following orders" isn't now and has never been a valid excuse
2. Go after the coercers or modify our understanding of liability to allow those targeted to make the argument that their superiors deserve to repay them every bit of penalty they owed.
Really, in the modern world, just sue someone and tell them they're on the hook but they'll be allowed to sue whoever is responsible for their portion of the responsibility and watch this all work itself out quickly.