What happens when the Florida legislature eliminates the centuries-old requirement that the government must prove that an accused person acted with criminal intent before he may be punished as a criminal? It risks making almost anyone a criminal – both those who intend to commit a crime and those who …
Although sanity and common sense are frequently lacking in opinions issued by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski offered both those things in a concurrence he recently authored in U.S. v. Goyal. In convicting Probhat Goyal (the former CFO of Network Associates) of securities fraud, submitting …
Abner Schoenwetter had been in the commercial seafood business since 1986. Over the years, Schoenwetter built a successful company distributing seafood across the country, including lobster tails imported from overseas. As far as Schoenwetter knew, all of his business transactions were perfectly legal and he had no reason to believe …
There are many shocking real-life stories in Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Research Fellow Brian Walsh’s and co-author Visiting Fellow Paul Rosenzweig’s new book, One Nation Under Arrest: How Crazy Laws, Rogue Prosecutors, and Activist Judges Threaten Your Liberty. None perhaps as revealing as the one The Economist chose to highlight …
A Colorado federal court last week struck down another of Congress’s well-intentioned but poorly drafted criminal laws—a law that exemplifies some of the root problems of overcriminalization. In a well-reasoned opinion [2010 WL 2802691 (opinion not yet available on the Internet)], the court held that the broad offense in the …
Exposing the extent to which criminal law has expanded, the Supreme Court today narrowed the scope of the federal “honest services” fraud statute and called into question the validity of Enron executive Jeffrey Skilling’s conviction. Justice Sonia Sotomayor and two other “liberal” justices would have gone even further than the …
