After a Legal Fight, Oberlin Says It Will Pay $36.59M to a Local Bakery

Why should my punishment be more severe because you want to stop others from doing something in the future? That's a disproportionate amount of punishment for the individual. Punishment should be equal to the crime, not have an additional component to be used to deter others who I have no affiliation with.

Public prosecution is absolutely terrible way to deal with dealing out punishment. Not all individuals are the same, not all crimes are the same, but once you are given a guilty verdict judges are expected to give out sentencing guidelines that match similar tag lines/crimes regardless of circumstances.

Punishment should be more personalized and should be a performance improvement plan based on the individual and how they respond to the effective plan/action.

I hired and worked with an Oberlin graduate. Great person. Talented engineer.

What specifically puts you off their entire student body; past, present, and future?

Some more interesting context from your link:

When the author anonymously interviewed students, he gathered the following responses:

• “I totally have [taken things from a store downtown without paying for it].

I think I’ve stolen from Gibson’s twice. I took a packet of those noodles that come in boxes… It wasn’t expensive and I felt like it. I just preferred not paying for it, but I could have.”

• A female student admitted that she has stolen many things from Gibson’s Bakery and Ben Franklin’s. “I took a wine bottle. I had a large winter jacket and I put the bottle in the lining and I walked right out.” And, “I took pens from Ben Franklin because individually the pens cost $4 and I thought it was a racket.”

• “Probably [I have stolen from downtown] but let me think about it…yeah, no, I do that all the time.” The same student then talked about how they stole a one-hundred-dollar ($100) bottle of wine from Gibson’s Bakery.

• “I have stolen from Gibson’s, Kim’s, IGA. I took some dumb stuff. From Gibson’s I took some steak knives for an avocado that I also stole. I was really drunk and that was really bad.”

• “I think I’ve taken candy and just small shit from Ben Franklin’s and the Oberlin Market.”

• “[I have taken] a few pens from Ben Franklin over the years… they’re hard to resist.”

• One said she’s never paid for Chapstick while at Oberlin for four years.

• The author: “I myself have stolen from the very people I’ve interviewed for this story. I could have paid for the items easily, but I chose to steal them instead.”

This student and/or institutional attitude was supported by the statistics provided from the Oberlin Police Department of thefts at Gibson’s Bakery from January 1, 2011 to November 14, 2016. These statistics show that of the 40 adults arrested for theft during that time period, 33 of those adults (82.5%) were Oberlin College students.

I can't find the link, but I read recently that FIRE came out against this verdict because they believe it infringes free speech.

I agree the FIRE rankings are a good resource. But it's worth pointing out that FIRE opposes this verdict.