One New Crime a Week

[XDConvert9mm]

Heritage Foundation: One New Crime a Week

Thursday, July 03, 2008
By Brian W. Walsh

It used to be easy to avoid committing a federal crime. If you avoided murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, assault, battery and theft, there were few options left.

But today you might want to consider hiring a small team of researchers if you want to be confident you won’t end up in federal prison. And even then you couldn’t be sure.

There are at least 4,450 offenses in federal criminal law. That’s the number Louisiana State University law professor John S. Baker Jr., and his researchers came up with in a just-published report.

Baker’s work updates a 1983 count conducted by the Justice Department itself. That tally found more than 3,000 criminal laws — meaning that in just 25 years Congress has created some 1,400 criminal offenses.

Both Baker and the Justice Department cautioned that they couldn’t be sure they had found them all. Congress has scattered criminal offenses throughout the tens of thousands of pages of the United States Code.

Baker’s study also found that at least 454 federal crimes were added from 2000 to 2007. That’s an average of about 56 new federal crimes a year.

In short, Congress has been creating one new crime a week.

Why should you care? Because more and more law-abiding citizens are winding up in a federal net. Hundreds and hundreds of these new offenses criminalize conduct that no one but a government lawyer would imagine is criminal.

An Alaskan inventor who never had so much as a traffic ticket was arrested, indicted and prosecuted by the feds because he failed to put the right sticker on a UPS package. He had no idea the sticker was required, and everything else about his shipment was perfectly legal.
But after being arrested and handcuffed, face-down on the pavement, by a half-dozen SWAT-team officers aiming assault rifles at him, he’s now spending almost two years in federal prison.

Fisherman David McNab, a seafood importer, and a seafood distributor are serving eight-year sentences in three U.S. prisons because McNab packed his catch in a manner that allegedly violated a Honduran regulation. It made no difference to the American courts that the highest officials of the Honduran government certified that McNab had, in fact, violated no Honduran law.

And a recent federal prosecution suggests that anyone who violates the rules of an online social networking site, such as MySpace or Facebook, by registering with a false name could spend up to five years in federal prison.

Making matters worse, few Americans charged with a federal crime ever get their day in court. Even if you are accused of a non-violent crime that doesn’t involve guns or drugs, chances are extremely high that you will plead guilty without getting an opportunity to tell your side of the story to a judge or jury.

The definitions of non-violent crimes are so broad — and federal prison sentences today are so long — that it’s usually far too risky to go to trial even if you never intended to do anything wrong. You’re better off pleading guilty to try to get a shorter sentence.

And ironically, more and more federal criminal laws mean you may be at greater risk of becoming a crime victim. When Congress federalizes violent crimes that are inherently local in nature — carjacking, for example — your local prosecutors and investigators often conclude that they should turn their attention elsewhere and leave that particular crime to the feds.
But the FBI doesn’t have an office in every city, much less agents patrolling every city street. And it’s simply not the job of the feds to keep street crime out of your neighborhood.

If over-federalizing crime is so bad, why does Congress keep doing it?

According to the American Bar Association, "new federal laws are passed not because federal prosecution of these crimes is necessary but because federal crime legislation in general is thought to be politically popular."
Even when new criminal laws are "misguided, unnecessary and even harmful," the ABA stated, "it is not considered politically wise to vote against crime legislation."

The political benefits to incumbents of rampant criminalization may explain why from 2000 to 2007 Congress passed three times as many crimes in election years as it did in non-election years. No member of Congress wants to be labeled "soft on crime" for voting against a bill touted as the answer to the most high-profile crime du jour.

No one should become a criminal under the many crazy federal laws criminalizing seemingly innocent conduct. And federal law enforcement shouldn’t be taxed with the job of fighting crime that should be handled by state and local law enforcement.

The proliferation of federal criminal law puts everyone at risk. Congress needs to kick its one-new-crime-a-week habit.

FOXNews.com - Heritage Foundation: One New Crime a Week - Opinion

See my sig line on this. Ayn Rand makes a lot of very good points, this one being critical. It's already practically impossible to go through an average life without unknowingly and innocently breaking some obscure Federal law (failing to remove the tax stamp from a pack of cigarettes for example). At one new unnecessary but politically popular Federal crime a week we'll soon literally be unable to avoid breaking one at some point in all of our daily lives.

[Se2002]

that is a long read!

[XDConvert9mm]

Originally Posted by Se2002

that is a long read!

It's actually just a one page article......

[AZXD]

Aw heck and here I thought I wouldn't be a real criminal until they outlawed guns

[Carnivorous]

One of my favorite Federal crimes: falsely claiming to be a member of 4-H gets you 6 months in the slammer.

[AZXD]

Awesome. I gotta remember that one

Originally Posted by Carnivorous

One of my favorite Federal crimes: falsely claiming to be a member of 4-H gets you 6 months in the slammer.

[Se2002]

Originally Posted by XDConvert9mm

It's actually just a one page article......

Good read none the less.

[gsh341]

Why do we let our politicians get away with this BS? Why can't the politicians go just one week without causing some new and stupid law to pass?

The political process has become a popularity contest instead of what the founders envisioned. The founding fathers wanted qualified individuals to serve their country out of love of country, not lust for power and fame. Most politicians will never truly have to live under the laws they create. They will continue to live an isolated life with the only goal of keeping and improving their power.

Congress and the Senate need to be brought to heel. The American public, by and large, has quit caring about who is really running this country and keep re-electing the same person time after time based on name recognition and sound bites.

We need a Constitutional Amendment to limit Congressional and Senate terms to 5 terms for Congress and 2 terms for the Senate. Only then can we get the dead wood professional politicians out and stop this madness.

[Jedi XD]

We need a Constitutional Amendment to limit Congressional and Senate terms to 5 terms for Congress and 2 terms for the Senate. Only then can we get the dead wood professional politicians out and stop this madness.

I was talking about this with a few guys here yesterday. I agree, that will make them hopefully realize that they need to actually accomplish something and that they can't just sit around and collect a paycheck. Maybe something more to them actually getting something done too, I mean if I(I don't mean "I" I mean everyone in the working sector), have to prove my worth to keep my job(well my position anyways), they should too.

[AZXD]

If we're gonna go that far ... Might I suggest a clause that states you will not go to work for a lobbying firm/group/agency until 5 years after the completion of public service.