Peanut Executive Sentenced to Longest-Ever Prison Term for Food Safety Violations
The owner of a company implicated in a major salmonella outbreak was sentenced to 28 years in prison for his role in a scheme to falsify test results and ship food without testing, said the Justice Department (here). Stewart Parnell,…
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former owner and president of the now-defunct Peanut Corporation of America, was convicted in Middle Georgia U.S. District Court for fabricating testing certificates that said the company’s peanuts were free of pathogens, when in fact there had been no testing of the food or tests had revealed the presence of pathogens. The salmonella outbreak that ensued in 2009 led to over 22,000 cases in 46 states, including nine deaths. Parnell’s prison sentence is the longest to date in a food safety case, said DOJ. His brother, Michael, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his role in the scheme.