Richard Blumenthal actually said...

"standards need to be sufficiently high, they need to be enforced rigorously, and that penalties have to provide a deterrent to violation of them."

"these relatively minuscule penalties... plainly, I think, provide an inadequate deterrent to violation-of-safety standards."

"I continue to believe that there has to be attention to the penalty provisions to make sure that they are commensurate with the kind of neglect and failing that we've seen at Metro-North on occasion t..."

"the $5,000 penalty, under those circumstances of neglect, the severity of the consequences, the seriousness of the safety violations, is atrociously inadequate as a measure of what happened here."