It was not, Federal Judge Robert Merhige insisted, a penalty so much as an expensive thought provoker. "I hope that after this sentencing," he said, "every corporate officer will think, 'If I don't do anything [about pollution], I will be out of a job.' "
Merhige's reminder, delivered in his Richmond courtroom last week, was the toughest sentence ever imposed on a corporation in a pollution case: a $13.2 million fine to be paid by the Allied Chemical Corp. for discharging Kepone and other chemical wastes. Slipshod procedures in the manufacture of the deadly pesticide in Hopewell, Va., had...
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