By Nikos Passas, Stratos Georgoulas, Christos Kouroutzas, Dimitris Paraskevopoulos 

This paper analyzes the Tempi railway tragedy of 28 February 2023 as a case of state-corporate crime and institutional corruption rather than a mere accident, focusing on the systemic endangerment of Greece’s mass transportation system. Drawing on qualitative content analysis of official documents and media records, 76 semi-structured interviews, and ongoing participant observation, the study reconstructs how safety-critical investments and controls were undermined by corrupt practices, regulatory neglect, and austerity-driven privatization. The analysis shows how criminogenic asymmetries, dysnomie, and the normalization of deviance allowed unlawful and “lawful but awful” policies to hollow out the railways’ safety function while serving mutually reinforcing state and corporate interests. These governance failures obscured systemic risk, facilitated the misrepresentation of violations as “human error,” and weakened transparency, accountability, and effective compliance in the rail sector. By situating Tempi within a comparative framework of state-corporate crimes and transport disasters, the paper highlights the blurred boundaries between financial crime, institutional corruption, and regulatory failure in critical infrastructure. It concludes with policy and compliance recommendations aimed at strengthening structural accountability, restoring institutional integrity, and reducing systemic risk in mass transportation governance.

Journal of Illicit Trade, Financial Crime, and Compliance, vol. 1, 205.

By LINDSAY GRAEF, SANDRA G. MAYSON, AURÉLIE OUSS & MEGAN T. STEVENSON

This Article aims to reorient the conversation around “failure-to-appear” (FTA) in criminal court. Recent policy and scholarship have addressed FTA mostly as a problem of criminal defendants in connection with questions about how bail systems should operate. But ten years of data from Philadelphia reveal a striking fact: it is not defendants who most frequently fail to appear but rather the other parties necessary for a criminal proceeding—witnesses and lawyers. Between 2010 and 2020, an essential witness or private attorney failed to appear for at least one hearing in 53% of all cases, compared to a 19% FTA rate for defendants. Police officers, victims, other witnesses, and private attorneys each failed to appear at rates substantially higher than defendants. In short: FTA is a systemic phenomenon.

The systemic nature of FTA calls into question the extreme asymmetry between the treatment of defendant and non-defendant FTA. Bail reform has generated intense debates about when cash bail, detention, and other pretrial interventions are warranted to ensure defendants’ appearance. Given that witnesses and lawyers also have a legal duty to appear, the systemic nature of FTA requires more comprehensive thinking about how best to get people to court and when restrictions on liberty are appropriate.

Systemic FTA also has systemic consequences, because when essential witnesses don’t show, cases are dismissed or withdrawn. FTA thus serves a regulatory function by providing a check on the nature and volume of criminal adjudications. Sometimes this function seems beneficial, as when witness FTA carries information about the strength or worth of the case, but other times it seems like a problem. The sheer volume of police officer FTA creates an impression of arbitrariness, dysfunction, and disrespect. Other aspects of this regulatory dynamic are more ambiguous. For instance, victim FTA rates are so persistently high that many appear to be effectively “opting out” of the criminal proceeding. Does this tell us that certain classes of harm are better dealt with outside of the criminal legal process? Or are we, as a society, losing something valuable when cases are dismissed due to victim or witness nonappearance? More generally, when is witness FTA a problem and when is it a healthy check on the system? This Article aims to draw attention to systemic FTA as an important feature of contemporary U.S. criminal legal systems, identify the core questions that it raises, and lay a path for future research.

172 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1 (2024)., 60p.