Over the last few years, The Heritage Foundation and a wide-ranging group of partners – including such organizations as the American Bar Association, American Civil Liberties Union, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), Washington Legal Foundation, and the Manhattan Institute – have been at the forefront of a bipartisan coalition leading the charge against over criminalization in America. During this time, Heritage has worked to spearhead two congressionalhearings on the subject and to co-author a joint report on the degradation of adequate criminal-intent requirements in federal law. With the 112th Congress convening in a few weeks, Heritage and its coalition partners are calling upon both Republicans and Democrats to help return criminal law to the way it is “supposed to work.”
A real threat to our constitutional framework of criminal justice.
Judge Kozinski’s harsh rebuke of the federal prosecutors:
This case has consumed an inordinate amount of taxpayer resources, and has no doubt devastated the defendant’s personal and professional life. And, in the end, the government couldn’t prove that the defendant engaged in any criminal conduct. This is just one of a string of recent cases in which courts have found that federal prosecutors overreached by trying to stretch criminal law beyond its proper bounds…
Judge Kozinski’s words do much to accentuate a very real problem that is currently undermining the civil liberties of all Americans – the phenomenon of over-criminalization. The exponential growth of the federal criminal law over the last few decades has created a labyrinthine collection of statutes and regulations that allows the government to subject individuals whose conduct is either unintentional or not otherwise blameworthy to criminal sanctions – society’s most severe form of punishment and moral condemnation. This is a fundamental departure from the traditional moorings of American criminal law, and one that has garnered great attention from organizations and individuals on both sides of the political aisle.
To that end, Members of Congress (new and old alike) would be well served to take on the problem of overcriminalization and consider the common-sense, non-partisan solutions offered by Heritage and NACDL in their joint Without Intent report. Former Attorney General Ed Meese discussed one such reform here – a House rule requiring every bill that proposes or modifies a federal crime to be referred to the House Judiciary Committee before heading to the floor. Working to implement that change and the handful of other reform proposals discussed in Without Intent will go a long way toward eliminating the problems highlighted by Judge Kozinski and tempering a real threat to our constitutional framework of criminal justice.
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