Originally published at Cato Institute by Jonathan Blanks | July 19, 2013
“Bipartisanship” sounds like a good idea in theory, but it usually ends up as broad congressional agreement that the American people have too many liberties or too much money. However, there is one area in which there is a growing bipartisan effort toward increased individual liberty: fighting overcriminalization.
Today, the House Judiciary Committee’s Overcriminalization Task Force held its second hearing, in which members of Congress asked two leading legal experts about the importance of restoring some sanity to federal law. Specifically, this hearing focused on the lack of mens rea—that is, criminal intent—in many federal criminal prosecutions. Put simply, as the law stands, an American can unknowingly and accidentally break federal law yet still be held criminally liable for felonies in federal courts. The conduct that leads to these prosecutions is often not serious, and sometimes nothing more than an administrative mistake. Other times, these offenses are simply the result of overzealous federal prosecutors stretching the limits of broad statutory or regulatory language to pad their conviction totals without much effort or expenditure. Yet these seemingly harmless acts can trigger prosecutions that can cost families their livelihoods or even land innocent people in federal prison.
The abuse of the law is so clear that, throughout the hearing that lasted just over an hour, 10 members of Congress and two witnesses—Norman Reimer of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and law professor John Baker—found very little about which to disagree. You can watch the very heartening and informative hearing here (action begins at the 19:00 minute mark, just after 9:03AM), via the Library of Congress on USTREAM.
For a primer on overcriminalization, I highly recommend Cato’s new video with Families Against Mandatory Minimums’ Molly Gill:
