So a New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 BILLION after a jury found more than 43 million violations of the state's consumer protection law. The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and centred on Facebook misleading users about their data. The judge described the deception as intentional and systemic, and said the misleading statements included some made by Mark Zuckerberg and then-chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. The case was against the company, so neither faces any personal penalty from it. Meta will appeal. That works out at under $600 per violation. In the US, unpaid court fines and fees of a few hundred dollars can land a poor person in jail. Courts can jail people for failing to pay in almost every state, and one study estimated that between 2005 and 2018, Texas did so around 38,000 times a year. Meta, by contrast, argued its penalty should be $3.45bn and will spend years contesting it. For a company that size, even a record fine can look like a cost of doing business. On the evening of the ruling, Meta reported that it had absorbed a separate $9.89bn legal charge in a single quarter and still recorded $9.86bn in net income, and its shares rose almost 4% in after-hours trading. In 2019, when Facebook received a record $5bn fine over the same scandal, it had already set the money aside, and its shares rose then too. The people at the top rarely face personal consequences either. Brandon Garrett found that only 34% of federal corporate deferred and non-prosecution agreements between 2001 and 2014 were accompanied by charges against individuals, and those charged were mostly not senior executives. The 2008 financial crisis led to the jailing of just *one* Wall Street banker. Boeing's 737 Max crashes killed 346 people, and no executive has been held criminally responsible for them. Here in Britain, hundreds of subpostmasters were prosecuted over faulty Post Office software, some were jailed, and nobody has yet been charged. A poor person who can't pay a fine can lose their liberty. A corporation pays from its profits, and its leaders keep their fortunes and their freedom. A poor person who can’t pay a fine can lose their liberty. A corporation pays from its profits, and its leaders keep their fortunes and their freedom. Politicians on the right on both sides of the Atlantic love to complain about “two-tier justice”. This is the kind they rarely mention.