Abstract This paper is written on a current article that was recently published. The article is criminal justice related and about the BP oil spills that happened two years ago. The paper will be a brief summary of the article and what has happened since the oil spill.
On Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 7:40 P.M. Federal prosecutors brought the first criminal charges in the Gulf oil spill, accusing a former BP engineer of deleting more than 300 text messages that indicated the blown-out well was spewing far more crude than the company was telling the public at the time. Two years and four days after the drilling-rig explosion that set off the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, Kurt Mix, age fifty, of Katy, Texas, was arrested and charged with two counts of obstruction of justice for allegedly destroying evidence (McGill).
The government says he intentionally deleted text messages from his phone, but the content of those messages still resides in thousands of emails and other documents that he saved. The U.S. Justice Department made it clear that the investigation is still going on and suggested that more people could be arrested. In a statement, Attorney General Eric Holder said prosecutors “will hold accountable those who violated the law in connection with the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history”. Federal investigators have been looking into the causes of the blowout along with the actions of managers, engineers and rig workers at BP. They are also looking into its subcontractors, Halliburton and Transocean, in the days and hours before the April 20, 2010, explosion (McGill).
The Essay on Exxon Valdez Spilled Oil
The Exxon Valdez is an American oil tanker that went aground on a reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, on the night of March 24, 1989. The nine hundred and eighty seven-foot tanker ran aground on a reef and started to leak oil. The leakage continued for two days, totaling eleven million gallons the largest oil spill in U. S. history. The tanker's remaining 1 million barrels of oil were removed ...
However, the case against Mix only focuses on the aftermath of the blast, when BP scrambled for weeks to plug the leak. And even then, the charges are not really about the disaster itself, but about an alleged attempt to thwart the investigation into it. Prosecutors also said BP gave the public an optimistic account of its May 2010 efforts to plug the well via a technique called a “top kill,” even though the company’s internal data and some of the text messages showed the operation was likely to fail. In a statement, BP said it is cooperating with the Justice Department and added: “BP had clear policies requiring preservation of evidence in this case and has undertaken substantial and ongoing efforts to preserve evidence.” Billy Nungesser, president of hard-hit Plaquemines Parish, who has long accused BP of misleading the public about the spill, said: “We’re just glad that the truth, and all the truth, will come out. Where crimes were committed, BP needs to pay the price (McGill).”
