Abstract
Organized criminals have ways of sticking it to you after you are dead—the law typically does not. The law will not send your family swimming with cement shoes, nor inflict any of the other creative kinds of harm depicted in films like The Godfather.1 But when organized criminals have harmed somebody, is it really a matter of punishment to go beyond their grave, not in the macabre manners of organized crime depicted in popular culture, but to recover money to pay for the injuries their criminal indiscretions have caused? It certainly seems just. In fact, in the civil portion of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), Congress created a statute that claims to do just that.2 However, it is not so simple. RICO has a penal side as well,3 and it may even disguise itself as a remedy to reach beyond the grave and recover more than the amount of an injury. This is problematic because for centuries courts have allowed civil actions to survive the death of either party if they are remedial in nature but not if they are penal.4 While this seems like a natural dichotomy, RICO proves otherwise. RICO is indisputably schizophrenic, rolling penalties and remedies together into one action.5 Courts have dealt with this dilemma by attempting to force civil RICO claims into either category,6 but they are split as to which category, creating legal fictions either way. This Note argues that the solution is to acknowledge and embrace that RICO has ambiguous intent, and then to create a rule for RICO survivability based on the specific policy concerns that shaped the original rules.
Recommended Citation
Hawkes II, E. Rich
(2008)
"Once Whacked: The Survivability of Civil
RICO Claims,"
Utah Law Review: Vol. 2008:
No.
1, Article 10.
Available at:
https://dc.law.utah.edu/ulr/vol2008/iss1/10