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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
