Two Republican lawmakers say it’s time to take another look at the federal government’s ever-expanding list of crimes with a focus on making it harder for government to charge citizens with crimes committed with zero criminal intent.
According to Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), lawmakers add an additional 500 new crimes to the U.S. Code each year.
The lawmakers say the problem is that while government has been prolific in creating new crimes, Congress has done a lousy job of setting clear standards for criminal intent, or mens rea.
“Criminal intent requirements protect law-abiding Americans from being tripped up by the morass of modern criminal law,” the two write in a recent statement. “They guard against unjust prosecution and the incarceration of morally innocent actors.”
As examples of what can happen when criminal intent isn’t firmly established, Goodlatte and Hatch cite the story of a 23-year-old man who found a buried skull on a hunting trip in Alaska. When he turned the skull over to federal officials, he was charged with charged with removing an archaeological resource from public lands. In another example, the parents of a young girl who saved a woodpecker from the family cat were fined for transporting the woodpecker to safety in violation of the Migratory Bird Act.
Goodlatte and Hatch have introduced a proposal that would increase the degree to which prosecutors must prove a defendants criminal intent for certain offenses.
“Our bills say that in situations in which a federal criminal law fails to provide a clear standard of criminal intent, a default standard will apply,” they write, adding the requirements ensure “honest, hard-working Americans do not become criminals because they accidentally do something unlawful or violate an obscure law.”
But Democrats and federal prosecutors are crying foul on the legislative proposals, saying they are aimed primarily at insulating corporate CEOs who are “willfully ignorant” of illegal business activities from federal penalties.
As reported by The Washington Post:
Democratic lawmakers and liberal activists are deeply critical of this effort, calling it a quiet attempt to make it ever more difficult for the federal government to prosecute corporations and their executives for crimes against the public welfare. A top Justice Department official joined the chorus Wednesday, saying that one of the leading proposals to overhaul mens rea requirements would go far beyond corporate regulatory matters to make prosecutions of terrorists and child pornographers more difficult.
Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell, chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said a pending mens rea proposal backed by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) would “seriously harm our basic ability to prosecute a wide array of federal crimes” and “unleash sweeping changes across the the United States Code” that would clog courts with costly litigation and weaken the government’s ability to enforce a wide range of laws and regulations.
Still, there’s plenty of evidence that average Americans would benefit far more from stronger mens rea standards than corporate cronies.
There are currently more than 4,500 federal statutes, plus thousands more embedded in federal regulations, many of which have been added to the penal code since the 1970s. This has made it easier than ever for citizens to unknowingly break a law, and they are more and more often prosecuted without the consideration of mens rea. That’s because more than 40 percent of nonviolent offenses created or amended during two recent congressional sessions had “weak” mens rea requirements at best, according to a study conducted by the conservative Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
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