Chapter 5 of One Nation Under Arrest is titled “Criminalizing Kids.” This chapter includes stories demonstrating that it is not just adults who face the dangers of overcriminalization. The prevailing mindset among most legislators and government policy makers is that criminal law and criminal punishment are generally the best tools to “solve” any important problem. As a result, more and more children have been victimized by overcriminalization. The Boy Scout motto is “Be Prepared,” but not even Miles Rankin’s Scout Master could have prepared Miles for the injustice this twelve-year-old …
How should a city treat one of its long-time, law-abiding citizens if her mature, decades-old hedges offend aggressive new standards set by city bureaucrats? What if this citizen is a 61-year-old grandmother fighting breast cancer? The answer the City of Palo Alto, California, provided to these questions was to send out two police officers to arrest Kay Leibrand in front of her home and neighbors and to charge her as a criminal. As explained in One Nation Under Arrest, The Heritage Foundation’s new book on overcriminalization, this was an oppressive …
If Congress drafts a law and no one can understand it, can individuals be punished for breaking it? Increasingly, to the detriment of all Americans, the answer is yes. Since our nation’s founding, a core principle of our system of justice has been that no citizen should be subjected to criminal punishment for conduct that he did not know was illegal or otherwise wrongful. This principle is embodied in the requirement that the government must prove a defendant acted with intent, or at least knowledge, before subjecting him to criminal …
Twelve-year-old Ansche Hedgepeth grabbed an order of French fries after school on her way to the Tenleytown/American University Metrorail station in Washington, D.C. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority had decided to kick off a week of “zero tolerance” enforcement of “quality of life offenses.” When a police officer noticed Ansche, unaware of the no-eating rule on the metro, consuming her first French fry, she was immediately searched; her jacket, backpack, and shoelaces were confiscated; and she was handcuffed and taken to the Juvenile Processing Center in a paddy wagon. …
If you did not know that you were supposed to affix a federally mandated sticker to your otherwise lawful UPS package, should you be arrested face down on the pavement by FBI agents training automatic weapons at you? Our hunch is that most reasonable Americans would respond with an emphatic ‘No!’ Today we are launching a series of posts based on case studies adapted from our new book, One Nation Under Arrest: How Crazy Laws, Rogue Prosecutors, and Activist Judges Threaten Your Liberty. The book includes stories of average Americans …
Before President Barack Obama took over the White House, no United States citizen had ever been forced by the federal government to buy a product against their will. But now, thanks to the passage of Obamacare, Americans, by dint of their mere existence, are now required to purchase Obama administration approved health insurance or face a penalty assessed through the Internal Revenue Code. This is simply unprecedented. The income tax doesn’t kick in until an American earns income. Auto liability insurance doesn’t become mandated until an American chooses to drive …
This afternoon, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Skilling v. U.S. Most media coverage so far seems to be focusing on former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling’s request for an entirely new trial based on claims that the District Court where he was convicted failed to ensure an impartial jury when they refused to transfer the trial out of Houston. While every American’s Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury is important, many limited government conservatives (and civil libertarian liberals) are much more concerned with the fate of Skilling’s …
Heritage senior fellows Brian Walsh and Hans von Spakovsky have a new article out at NRO on the jail time provisions that exist in both the House and Senate bills. Read the whole thing, but here are some key graphs: By transforming a refusal or failure to comply with a government mandate into a federal tax violation, the “progressives” are using the brute force of criminal law to engage in social engineering. This represents an oppressive, absolutist view of government power. … The idea of imprisoning or fining Americans who …
The Associated Press reported on Tuesdayon a letter the Michigan Department of Human Services sent to suburban mom Lisa Snyder, warning her to stop watching her neighbors’ children while they waited in the mornings for the school bus. Apparently Snyder was kind enough to do this as a favor for a few of her friends who are working moms. Initial reports do not indicate whether the warning letter is backed by possible criminal penalties. What is certain, however, is that this is yet another example of overbroad laws that bureaucrats …
In today’s Politico, attorneys Peter Zeidenberg and William Minor point out that the Public Corruption Prosecution Improvements Act of 2009, which recently passed out of Sen. Patrick Leahy’s Senate Judiciary Committee, authorizes $100 million for new federal prosecutors and agents to root out “public corruption” using the federal “honest services” statute and other overly broad federal statutes. Under this amorphous, poorly worded statute, anyone can be subjected to 20 years in prison for allegedly depriving anyone else of “the intangible right of honest services.” What this right encompasses – as …
