More on BP's Guilty Plea: It's Not Just About the Money

Cross-posted from Legal Planet. As already noted by Rick and Megan, last week BP pleaded guilty to 14 criminal counts arising from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. Megan provided a good basic overview of the terms of the agreement. Here is the plea agreement itself. The amount of money BP has agreed to pay, in criminal fines and additional payments, has been the focus of most of the news coverage so far. The terms of BP's probation have gotten less attention, but are well worth exploring. Of course the amount of the fines and other payments matters. Never having had the experience of negotiating a plea agreement like this, I'm reluctant to speculate on whether the government could have gotten more out of BP. It's too early to evaluate whether the punishment fits the offense, since civil sanctions and natural resource damages remain to be determined. The plea agreement specifies that the payments it requires do not affect its liability for civil claims or natural resource damages. I was struck by the scope of the fines for the environmental offenses relative to the others. BP agreed to pay the maximum possible fine for each of the 11 manslaughter counts and the obstruction of Congress count. Together, the agreed fine for those counts totals $6 million, a tiny fraction of the total criminal fines. BP will pay another $100 million for violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and a whopping (at least relatively speaking) $1.15 billion for violating the Clean Water Act.