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 …
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 …
