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Restitution Rights for Victims of White-Collar Crime

By Seth Farber, Marcelo Blackburn and Sarah Viebrock
October 01, 2023

Victims of corporate misconduct have traditionally relied on civil litigation to force corporate wrongdoers to make them whole. While our civil justice system has been an effective vehicle for compensating victims, that system has drawbacks, including the time and expense involved in litigating a case to conclusion.

However, when corporate misconduct rises to the level of a crime, and when that crime results in a federal criminal conviction, victims have an alternative: an order of restitution as part of the corporate defendant's criminal sentence. As discussed below, victims enjoy several strategic advantages in a restitution proceeding that they do not in civil litigation.

In addition, the time and expense for a victim to pursue a restitution application are generally a fraction of what would be required to litigate a claim. Attractive as the option of a restitution claim may be, pursuing a restitution claim remains a relatively underutilized alternative, likely because victims' rights to restitution, and the procedures for obtaining restitution through the federal criminal justice system, are not widely understood (or at least not as well understood as the procedures for filing and litigating a civil complaint).

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