You are committing crimes every day!

In 2009, Boston civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate published his new book — Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent. Why this name? Because he estimates that the average American now unwittingly commits three federal felonies on a daily basis due to the vagueness and over-broadness of the federal law – a phenomenon called overcriminalization.

And it seems that Mr. Silverglate is not alone. This year, the Supreme Court of the United States shows special interest in the spectrum of the criminal justice system by agreeing to hear three cases concerning the honest-services law – a federal law which makes it a crime for officials to defraud their employers of “honest services” and which can be used to target an exceptionally broad swath of behavior.

Even more surprisingly, the conservatives and libertarians are now standing on the same side. “It’s remarkable,” said Mr. Norman Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, “The left and the right are now in agreement in the area of criminal justice, the whole idea of less government, less intrusion and less regulation.”

At first glance, it seems totally unreasonable for people to argue against the federal criminal justice system since it is what keeps us safe every day. However, what if I tell you that “it is a violation of federal law to give a false weather report” and that “people get put in jail for importing lobsters”. Currently, according to the Heritage Foundation, there are more than 4,400 criminal offenses in the federal code, many of which are so comprehensive and so vague that all Americans violate them every day.

That is a situation, according to Sandel, in which “our control over the forces that govern our lives is receding rather than increasing . . . Increasing number of citizens view the state as an overly intrusive presence, more likely to frustrate their purposes than advance them.” (Sandel 92)

The fundamental question here is: What does the Constitution require us to do with the criminal justice system? Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas of the Supreme Court, joined by their liberal colleagues (to most people’ surprise), have commented that “the original meaning of the Constitution require them to rule against government in, among other areas, the rights of criminal defendants”. Put the point in a simple way, the Constitution deems that the American people be protected from the power of the state.

Another concern about the overcriminalization arises from the fiscal conservatives’ worry about the economic consequences of a criminal justice leviathan. In the end, the United States proudly owns the largest prison population in the world.

Source:
Adam Liptak, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/us/24crime.html?_r=1