Posted on 10/30/2017 7:12:42 AM PDT by Kaslin
Editor's note: This column was co-authored by Jack Brown.
“Because I said so.” “Life isn’t fair.” “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” These are some of the great cop-outs of all time, and the last one is particularly troubling in a country with so many laws that it is impossible to count—let alone read—them all. When was the last time you sat down with a complete set of the federal, state, and local codes setting forth the tens of thousands of criminal violations for which you could be sent to jail? If you answered “never,” you’re in good company. Nevertheless, America’s judges still cling to the proposition that it’s perfectly fine to lock people up for doing something they had no idea was illegal. But it’s not fine, and the justifications for that palpably unfair rule have only grown more threadbare with time.
Things have gotten so bad that even an act as innocent as sharing a Netflix password or a bank website password with a family member could potentially carry criminal penalties if the website disallows password sharing. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 bans intentionally accessing a computer “without authorization,” and the Supreme Court has recently declined to hear a case from the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, United States v. Nosal, that held that password sharing could be prohibited by the Act. Although the majority opinion did not explicitly mention innocent password sharing, the dissent noted that the lack of any limiting principle meant that the majority’s reasoning could easily be used to criminalize a host of innocent conduct.
One rationale for the maxim that ignorance of the law is no excuse was to give people an incentive to educate themselves about legal requirements. But as any law student will attest, one can study those requirements for years and barely scratch the surface. Another rationale was to prevent people from escaping criminal penalties by claiming ignorance, even when they actually knew they were breaking the law. That might have made sense in ancient times when there were only a few dozen crimes on the books and all of them involved morally blameworthy conduct like murder, arson, or rape.
But today the law has grown so complicated, and the relationship between law and morality so attenuated, that these supporting rationales no longer make sense. There have been multiple attempts to count the number of federal crimes, including by the Department of Justice, and no one has yet succeeded. Title 18 of the United States Code, which governs crimes and criminal procedure, has over 6,000 sections, and it is estimated that there are more than 4,500 federal crimes and over 300,000 agency regulations containing criminal penalties. And of course this does not include the dizzying array of state and local criminal codes, ignorance of which is practically assured but still not excused.
Moreover, as noted, the increasing criminalization of morally blameless conduct makes the punishment of innocent mistakes even more likely. For example, federal law makes it illegalto possess the feather of any native migratory bird even if one just picks it up off the ground, and the potential penalties for doing so include fines and even time in prison. Think federal prosecutors would exercise their discretion to prevent miscarriages of justice under such obscure laws? Think again. Contrary examples are as numerous as they are horrifying.
A trio of seafood importers were sentenced to eight years in federal prison because some of the lobsters they imported from Honduras were alleged to be undersized or egg-bearing females that were unlawfully shipped in plastic bags instead of the cardboard boxes mandated by federal law.
Or consider the plight of former Indianapolis 500 champion Bobby Unser, who was convicted of illegally driving his snowmobile in a National Forest Wilderness Area in 1996 after he and a friend were stranded in the mountains during a blizzard, and forced to take shelter in a barn while suffering from hypothermia. Reconstructing their meandering path in whiteout conditions, prosecutors concluded they had strayed onto federal land and convicted Unser of the misdemeanor crime of operating a snowmobile in a national wilderness area.
Even people attempting to perform virtuous acts have been persecuted by overzealous regulators. In 2009, Robert Eldridge, a fisherman from West Chatham, Massachusetts, faced up to a $100,000 fine and a year in prison after he freed a humpback whale that had been caught in his fishing gear, and only escaped with a comparatively small $500 fine after pleading guilty. More recently, Alison Capo also faced a year in prison after her daughter rescued a federally protected woodpecker from the family cat. The two were apprehended by a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Officer who overheard them talking about the bird while shopping for a suitable container at a Lowe’s home improvement store (Her initial fine of $535 was ultimately rescinded by the agency, claiming it was a “clerical error.”).
Subjecting well-meaning homeowners, desperate snowmobilers, innocent password sharers, and countless other blameless Americans to prosecution for conduct that no reasonable person would know was illegal does nothing to advance the cause of justice and much to undermine it. If the government cannot even count all of the criminal laws it has enacted, how on earth can citizens be expected to obey them?
ON one hand, lawyers say, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”
ON the other hand, lawyers say, “If you run into the law, you’ll need a lawyer because the law is too complicated for the layman to understand.”
Funny thing, too, since the US Constitution, the originating document for all law, is written in English, yet, lawyers like to practice law using Latin, as though they are trying to hide their thoughts from the layman.
Ignorance *IS* an excuse. Works every time. With the caveat that you are a leftist.
Ignorance *IS NEVER* an excuse, otherwise.
To avoid ignorance of the law the entire population needs to go to law school.
“To avoid ignorance of the law the entire population needs to”...shoot all the lawyers, erase all laws, and start over.
Not even lawyers know ALL the law. Most are only knowledgeable about the parts in their area of expertise, and still have to research the exact answer to questions.
The Lord gave us 10 perfectly good ones.
What we need is more laws to go after the regulators, government attorneys and bureaucrats. In some cases you can get them for procedural errors or in a perjury trap. If anyone is wronged by over-zealous prosecution, the victim should file a complaint to their legal board or other venue for bureaucrats (in WI it’s legislative audit bureau). That way if cases go to court, their integrity can be impugned in subsequent and other legal proceedings and it forces them on the defensive.
Bureaucrats like to be nameless and faceless so -called “public servants”. In reality, they have more privacy than those in the so-called “private sector” upon whom they prey.
BTW, Oliver Wendell Holmes is purported to have crafted the phrase “ignorance of the law is not excuse”. He was also an ardent eugenicist.
To what end?
It has already been established that even law "professionals" with decades of training and experience are unable to know, understand and apply the hundreds of thousands of laws, policies, regulations and "precedents?"
Does revisiting Atlas Shrugged suddenly make total sense?
Except for the distressing fact that the more I read what "esteemed legal minds" have to say on issues, the more certain I am that nothing galvanizes ignorance like their education.
Take, for example, the phrase first amendment protected speech
— the first amendment confers exactly zero protections upon speech, what it does is prohibits the Congress from making any law abridging the freedom of speech
… but then they whip out the Fourteenth Amendment and the so-called Incorporation
, which is claimed applies all of the Bill of Rights to the States (and subordinate government). Except there's a HUGE problem here: the States, Counties, and Municipalities simply don't have a Congress. This means that in order for Incorporation
to have any effect the First Amendment must be altered in some manner before being applied to the State/County/Municipality. (But nothing in the Fourteenth Amendment is altering the Bill of Rights, so that cannot be the case.)
So, what we really have is a bunch of people in Black Robes trying to usurp power, wrapping themselves in the veneer of the law and legalisms.
Um,I was joking to show the absurdity of everyone being expected to know every single law.
The lawmakers want it that way. This way innocent people are ensnared in the net of an out-of-control law, and the prosecutors can crow about all their indictments and how they’re putting away criminals.
It’s about getting the numbers up. So what if the law was deliberately made unworkable SO AS to trap people?
They have discretion, which means that they can set free those who are politically connected or who have paid big bucks to a well-placed politician, and ream the a$$es of the ordinary people who go to work for a living.
OK, we need one NEW law: All existing laws must be rewritten to a format of three pages or less, in language and usage understandable by any English speaking person with the equivalent of a sixth grade education.
I knew that; I was simply agreeing with you (and every other visitor to this thread, apparently)
“Man … must necessarily be subject to the laws of his Creator.. This will of his Maker is called the law of nature…. This law of nature…is of course superior to any other…. No human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this: and such of them as are valid derive all their force…from this original.” – Sir William Blackstone (Eminent English Jurist)
The Founders DID NOT establish the Constitution for the purpose of granting rights. Rather, they established this government of laws (not a government of men) in order to secure each person’s Creator endowed rights to life, liberty, and property.
Only in America, did a nation’s founders recognize that rights, though endowed by the Creator as unalienable prerogatives, would not be sustained in society unless they were protected under a code of law which was itself in harmony with a higher law. They called it “natural law,” or “Nature’s law.” Such law is the ultimate source and established limit for all of man’s laws and is intended to protect each of these natural rights for all of mankind. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 established the premise that in America a people might assume the station “to which the laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them..”
Herein lay the security for men’s individual rights – an immutable code of law, sanctioned by the Creator of man’s rights, and designed to promote, preserve, and protect him and his fellows in the enjoyment of their rights. They believed that such natural law, revealed to man through his reason, was capable of being understood by both the "ploughman and the professor." Sir William Blackstone, whose writings trained American’s lawyers for its first century, capsulized such reasoning:
“For as God, when he created matter, and endued it with a principle of mobility, established certain rules for the…direction of that motion; so, when he created man, and endued him with freewill to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that freewill is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purport of those laws.”
What are those natural laws? Blackstone continued:
“Such among others are these principles: that we should live honestly, should hurt nobody, and should render to every one his due..”
The Founders saw these as moral duties between individuals. Thomas Jefferson wrote:
“Man has been subjected by his Creator to the moral law, of which his feelings, or conscience as it is sometimes called, are the evidence with which his Creator has furnished him …. The moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature, accompany them into a state of society . their Maker not having released them from those duties on their forming themselves into a nation.”
Americas leaders of 1787 had studied Cicero, Polybius, Coke, Locke, Montesquieu, and Blackstone, among others, as well as the history of the rise and fall of governments, and they recognized these underlying principles of law as those of the Decalogue, the Golden Rule, and the deepest thought of the ages.
An example of the harmony of natural law and natural rights is Blackstone’s “that we should live honestly” – otherwise known as “thou shalt not steal” – whose corresponding natural right is that of individual freedom to acquire and own, through honest initiative, private property. In the Founders’ view, this law and this right were inalterable and of a higher order than any written law of man.
Thus, the Constitution confirmed the law and secured the right and bound both individuals and their representatives in government to a moral code which did not permit either to take the earnings of another without his consent. Under this code, individuals could not band together and do, through government’s coercive power, that which was not lawful between individuals.
America’s Constitution is the culmination of the best reasoning of men of all time and is based on the most profound and beneficial values mankind has been able to fathom. It is, as William E. Gladstone observed, “The Most Wonderful Work Ever Struck Off At A Given Time By The Brain And Purpose Of Man.“
We should dedicate ourselves to rediscovering and preserving an understanding of our Constitution’s basis in natural law for the protection of natural rights – principles which have provided American citizens with more protection for individual rights, while guaranteeing more freedom, than any people on earth.
“The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.” -John Locke
Lawyers must have their complex jargon and secret handshakes to justify the exorbitant fees they charge.
“All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.” Matthew 5:37
“All the extravagance and incompetence of our present Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizens has a lawyer behind it. ”
—H.L. Mencken
Unfortunately, what you and I agree that Freedom entails is largely different from what a Leftist believes that Freedom entails.
"Although the majority opinion did not explicitly mention innocent password sharing, the dissent noted that the lack of any limiting principle meant that the majority’s reasoning could easily be used to criminalize a host of innocent conduct."
FR: Never Accept the Premise of Your Opponent’s Argument
The Court’s explanation for not hearing the referenced case is lame imo.
More specifically, when any law, regulation or official action of the constitutionally limited power federal government is questioned, the fed’s constitutional authority to make a given law or regulation also needs to be clarified imo.
"From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added].” —United States v. Butler, 1936.
That being said, the states have never expressly constitutionally delegated to the corrupt feds the specific power to make "The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986” imo, that law another example of the already unconstitutionally big federal government unconstitutionally expanding its powers imo.
In fact, I strongly suggest that the states amend the Constitution to require that all three branches of the federal government reference the constitutional clauses that justify a law, bill or action when officially and publicly commenting about a law, bill or action.
The CBO should also be constitutionally required to publicly report appropriations bills that cannot be justified under Congress’s constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers.
"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States."—Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
Next, patriots are reminded that the 2016 elections are arguably not over yet, patriots needing to finish the job that they started when they elected Pres. Trump.
More specifically, patriots need to make sure that there are plenty of state sovereignty-respecting, Trump-supporting patriot candidates on the primary ballots for the 2018 elections, and then pink-slip Trump-hating career lawmakers by sending patriot candidate lawmakers to DC on election day.
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