The Senate is currently considering the addition of a public corruption bill as an amendment to the STOCK Act. While the goal of reining in public corruption is laudable, as has been discussed before, many of the policies in the proposed amendment raise significant overcriminalization concerns. Heritage, a task force of the American Bar Association, and other leading legal scholars have pointed out the problem of the increasing federalization of crime. And yet Congress continues to enact new criminal laws targeting state and local conduct. The proposed amendment seeks to …
With their institution at all-time lows in public popularity and trust, it is no wonder that members of Congress are looking to improve the body’s image. The “Clean Up Government Act,” which is coming before the House Judiciary Committee this week, is one of the most prominent attempts to do so. But a closer look shows that Congress is merely extending its streak of overcriminalization and overfederalization in the name of “good governance.” In July, a hearing on the bill showed that there were clear problems with the legislation. Rep. …
Gibson Guitar is an American icon. Musicians ranging from blues legend B.B. King to rock stars with Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith have used its guitars. Today, however, the guitar maker is facing a high-profile persecution from its own government. The U.S. Justice Department is pursuing a case that smacks of overcriminalization. Federal agents raided Gibson’s Nashville headquarters in August, the second raid on the company since 2009. Agents were working off a tip that Gibson broke laws in India and Madagascar, two countries that supply Gibson with ebony and other …
Catching you up on clips, commentary and news of the day. Sign up for the daily email update from Scribe. Ambrose: Federal law will get you even if you watch out – Jay Ambrose, Scripps Howard News Service Issa: Postal Service Must Cut Workers – Newsmax Wires Russia Pledges to Resist Western-Led Regime Change After Syria Veto in UN – Henry Meyer, Bloomberg Lure overseas cash back into the US – Scot Lehigh, Boston Globe The ‘magic button’ of economics doesn’t work – Jay Bookman, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Palestinian Authority …
Do you know all the laws of the United States? Do you know all the laws of each of the 50 states (not to mention the assorted territories, Indian reservations, and other enclaves)? Probably not. And yet “ignorance of the law is no excuse” has been a maxim of criminal law since time immemorial. The result is an ever-expanding discretion for prosecutors – who now can pick a target for an investigation and then scour the statutes for a suitable crime with which to charge him. As Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s …
Animal rights activists and commercial fisherman may find little common ground, but both can share their plight as victims of overcriminalization. The front page story in the Wall Street Journal juxtaposes these often-at-odds groups because they are vulnerable to the problems of overbroad and ambiguous legislation… along with the rest of us. Year after year, Congress proposes hundreds of criminal laws, and, frighteningly, many are enacted that do not require the accused to be aware that his conduct is illegal. Even the most casual observers of the criminal law system, …
How much danger does the federal government’s unprincipled, out-of-control body of criminal law pose to, say, the average American small-business person? Well, suppose you were a small-business owner, and for twelve years both U.S. Customs and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had been inspecting the shipments of seafood you were importing to sell to U.S. restaurant distributors. Suppose that for the entirety of those twelve years you had always packaged your shipments using plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes. Suppose that there is no U.S. law requiring you …
Last month, a hyper-aggressive U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent, accompanied by a Virginia state trooper, arrived at Alison Capo’s door to announce that our friendly federal government intended to make her a federal criminal. The reason? Alison’s daughter Skylar rescued a woodpecker from being eaten by a cat. The penalty? A $535 fine and possible incarceration—a maximum of six months to a year in federal prison—because of a dangerously flawed federal law called the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. According to WUSA, eleven-year-old Skylar came upon a baby woodpecker just …
Aspiring inventor Krister Evertson received a two-year sentence for allegedly abandoning materials that he had stored in sealed, stainless-steel containers, thus doing no harm to the environment. Indianapolis 500 champion Bobby Unser was prosecuted and convicted because federal prosecutors estimated that he and his snowmobiling companion wandered into a national wilderness area when they were fighting for their very lives, stranded for 2 days in a Rocky Mountain high-country blizzard. And federal officials prosecuted and convicted two arrowhead-collecting hobbyists, 66-year-old Eddie Leroy Anderson and his son, who unsuccessfully spent time …
The Wall Street Journal this weekend documented several sad features of the federal government’s proliferation of poorly written criminal laws, many of which leave it to prosecutors to pick and choose which Americans to prosecute as criminals. The Journal chronicles the stories of a half dozen Americans who became the targets of unprincipled, amorphous federal criminal laws. Heritage’s One Nation Under Arrest tells several more. It is thus disturbing that Congress has recently and repeatedly been mounting efforts to shutter the few rays of light the U.S. Supreme Court has …
