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Jewish World Review Oct 5, 2011 / 7 Tishrei, 5772 Federal law will get you even if you watch out By Jay Ambrose
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Figuring on going somewhere? Stay home and remain seated, because the federal government may otherwise throw you in jail. If you think I am kidding when I explain that tens of thousands of criminal laws are out there waiting to grab you, listen to John Baker Jr. "Congress has made every American potentially indictable for a federal crime," the law professor said to me as he explained the threat that began growing when Richard Nixon was in the White House. This president wanted a war on crime and got that and a lot more. As decades passed, liberals and conservatives joined forces in passing all kinds of criminalizing measures, often without knowing what the laws actually said. They did this despite the fact that criminal law is meant to be primarily a state function. The Constitution outlined just three federal offenses -- piracy, treason and counterfeiting -- but Congress has added more than 4,500 statutes to the list since then, and that's without counting the arduous, undying assistance of bureaucrats. These happily busy public servants have squeezed in so many additional federal offenses on some 27,000 pages of the U.S. Code that groups trying to calculate the total have given up, including the U.S. Justice Department, the American Bar Association and the Congressional Research Service Given that no one even has a handle on the number of these laws, it's obvious that not a soul out there can possibly know what most of them say, and then there is the related issue that many of them allow conviction with no proof of criminal intent, known by the Latin phrase, "mens rea," or "evil-meaning mind." Some of these laws are big-time with big-time sentences, but are so vague you can step on the cliff thinking you're on a legal bridge, and others are trivial, everyday stuff that can still can put you in jail, cost you a big fine and subject you to public humiliation. Maybe you somehow misappropriated the Smoky the Bear or Woody the Owl character. It could be handcuff time, friend. Chances are it won't happen to you, but it could even though you had absolutely no idea you were doing anything wrong and are far removed from entertaining criminal thoughts. Consider Bobby Unser, the race car driver, who was out snowmobiling with a friend and got lost. They abandoned one snowmobile, went in the direction of possible help and then struck out on foot, eventually finding their way to safety after two days of facing death. Federal officials wanted to know where Unser lost his snowmobile, and he told them and they said, well, that means you were on protected federal land and broke the law and face a $5,500 fine and six months in jail. He fought back with the help of several large organizations that think highly of justice, but even though the government never found the snowmobile, he had failed to prove himself innocent and was declared guilty. He was fined $75, but this was after he and those groups had spent as much as $800,000 fighting the case and the government spent something like $1 million, according to his version on an online video. The Wall Street Journal has been doing running a series of articles on this over-criminalization, and a number of groups are doing their best to get more politician involved, among them the Federalist Society (with which Baker is associated), the American Civil Liberties Union, the Heritage Foundation and the Washington Legal Foundation. Solutions? Some of those suggested are outright repeal of many of the laws, rewriting others, careful codification and switching some from criminal to civil penalties only. Before some of this can happen, the government will maybe need to assign people for years and years just to read everything that's there.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. Comment by clicking here. Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado.
• 09/28/11: Leftist bugbears on the march • 09/23/11: Still hope for coal to help us • 09/21/11: Obama's Madoff ploy • 09/19/11: U.S. can't afford to wait until it happens • 09/14/11: Defending -- and strengthening -- gung ho collectivism • 09/12/11: A pipeline to better times • 09/08/11: Obama just keeps destroying jobs • 09/06/11: Ultra-feminists thwarting justice • 08/31/11: Corporations are people? Yes, Count the ways • 08/26/11: What an earthquake tells us about debt • 08/25/11: The tyranny of scientific consensus • 08/23/11: Fracking hardly a public health threat • 08/17/11: Why Obamacare won't control births • 08/15/11: Balanced budget amendment unbalanced idea • 08/10/11: Kerry's war on citizen speech • 08/05/11: Upside to the compromise leaving the door open for obnoxious maneuvers • 08/03/11: The people who may save America • 07/29/11: On making deals, Obama is no LBJ • 07/27/11: The threat behind the debt • 07/23/11: Mean opposition to means-testing • 07/20/11: Leftist babble makes debt crisis even worse • 07/18/11: Time to raise demagoguery ceiling • 07/13/11: Obama treating treaties badly • 07/08/11: Is decline of U.S. exaggerated? • 07/05/11: Not math deficiency, but demagoguery
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