[saalweachter]

In the US, we have a fetish for proving people guilty. That's not to say our false conviction rate isn't through the roof, but even though everyone knows that someone is totally guilty, we don't do anything unless we can prove it.

So the sad fact of the matter is, if someone is a good enough criminal -- for instance, a CEO of a company with dozens of lawyers to advise him, who actually manages to not put anything in writing, and has enough firewalls between him and the activities in question to create reasonable doubt and plausible deniability -- he can totally get away with it.

On the other hand, if someone shows up and it's all amateur hour, and they all but gift wrap a big pile of evidence of their misdeeds, notarize and hand-deliver it to the authorities, we shouldn't hold off on prosecuting them just because smarter, bigger criminals are getting away with it, any more than we should hold off prosecuting the easy homicides just because the hard ones go unsolved.