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Opening Arguments

Greetings, fellow criminal

These are not good days for libertarians with delicate sensibilities:

The Founders viewed the criminal sanction as a last resort, reserved for serious offenses, clearly defined, so ordinary citizens would know whether they were violating the law.

Yet over the last 40 years, an unholy alliance of big-business-hating liberals and tough-on-crime conservatives has made criminalization the first line of attack -- a way to demonstrate seriousness about the social problem of the month, whether it's corporate scandals or e-mail spam.

[. . .]

There are now more than 4,000 federal crimes, spread out through some 27,000 pages of the U.S. Code. Some years ago, analysts at the Congressional Research Service tried to count the number of separate offenses on the books, and gave up, lacking the resources to get the job done. If teams of legal researchers can't make sense of the federal criminal code, obviously, ordinary citizens don't stand a chance.

You can serve federal time for interstate transport of water hyacinths, trafficking in unlicensed dentures, or misappropriating the likeness of Woodsy Owl and his associated slogan, "Give a hoot, don't pollute." ("What are you in for, kid?" your new cellmate growls.) Bills currently before Congress would send Americans to federal prison for eating horsemeat or selling goods falsely labeled as "Native American."

The author is commenting on a case argued before the Supreme Court in which a U.S. deputy solicitor general was trying to defend a 1988 law that criminalized schemes to "deprive another of the intangible right of honest services."  At one point, Justice Stephen Breyer noted that probably 140 million of the 150 million American workers could be defined as criminal under that test. And Justice Antonin Scalia wondered if our system now was one in which "Congress can say, nobody shall do any bad things"? That's rare agreement from two philosophic opposites.

If we really want to reform the criminal justice sytsem, a good place to start would be to examine every law on the books with the goal of eliminating at least 80 percent of them.

Comments

Bob G.
Wed, 12/16/2009 - 12:47pm

Agreed, Leo...a DARN fine start.
And ENFORCE stringently the OTHER 20%!
I like it!
(oh, and NO loopholes..leave those to the late W.C. Fields & the Bible)

tim zank
Thu, 12/17/2009 - 5:14pm

Again, Shakespeare was right.

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