Any moderately well-informed person these days is aware of the shocking injustices that happen whenever criminal laws get written by people who don’t really understand what criminal law is, or how it works. (Brilliant summary here.) They tend to create crimes that are ill-defined, overbroad, and usually an overreaction to...
So everyone from the Washington Post to Fark is reporting gleefully about the recent acquittal of a Northern Virginia man charged with failing to stop for a school bus picking up kids. The defense attorney is getting kudos for pointing out that the law, when rewritten 40 years ago,...
The Supreme Court is back in session on Monday, and we’re not ashamed to admit that we’re excited. As always. And they’re starting off the argument season with a bang — a critical issue on federal sentencing of gun crimes. Can’t wait. The case is actually two cases, Abbott v....
It looks like we spotted the trend. Unfortunately. Last week we noted that, when faced with an ambiguous statute, some on the Supreme Court are now willing to read new language into the statute, rather than toss it back to Congress to do it right. And we wondered if that might...
“Hate” is not an element of New York’s “hate crime” law. You don’t have to hate to commit a hate crime. Instead, the law merely requires that you have “a belief or perception” regarding a person’s race, color, national origin, ancestry, gender, religion, religious practice, age, disability or sexual orientation. ...
We’re still waiting to hear how the Supreme Court decides the trio of cases on “honest services” fraud. In the meantime, we’re wondering if yesterday’s Dolan decision might be a harbinger of what’s to come. In Dolan, the Court was dealing with a vague statute. It left out a crucial statement...
It was a case of very strange bedfellows today at the Supreme Court. The 5-4 decision in Dolan v. U.S. (opinion here) wasn’t split on ideological lines, but on lines of seniority. The majority consisted of the five most junior Justices, while the senior Justices were joined in a solid dissent. ...
Congress screwed up again.
Animal cruelty sucks. It’s against the law, in one form or another, in every single state. The feds wanted to outlaw it, as well. But they have that pesky jurisdictional hurdle to overcome, which they always try to get around by invoking interstate commerce. So in 1999, Congress passed a law making it a crime — not to commit acts of animal cruelty — but to have a photo or video of a living animal being wounded or killed, with the intention to place that depiction into interstate commerce for commercial gain. 18 U.S.C. §48.
That’s pretty awkward. And it doesn’t outlaw the actual cruelty itself. It’s sort of meant to stop animal cruelty from happening, by making it a federal crime to sell videos of it. Which is pretty lame and stupid, hardly a deterrent at all.
The law was really intended to focus on “crush videos,” which showed the killing of kitties and puppies, for an audience that derived sexual pleasure from such images. See Internet R. 34. The acts depicted in such videos are already against the law in every state, but there you go.
So Robert Stevens was a pit bull enthusiast and documentary film maker. He sold videos that were not “crush videos,” but which did depict dogfighting. Stevens said they were educational, to provide perspective on the phenomenon. The feds said they violated section 48.
This morning, an almost unanimous Court ruled that the statute is unconstitutionally overbroad. (Read the opinion here.) Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts focused not on the First Amendment issues that had been raised (which would have required the carving out of new First Amenment law), but instead zeroed in on the fact that this statute is supposed to apply only to specific types of “extreme” material.
Overbreadth analysis doesn’t require the making of new constitutional law. All you do is …
In a sort-of unanimous opinion today, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of a Mexican who’d tried to get a job by using counterfeit Social Security and Alien Registration cards along with a fake name and date of birth. He’d been convicted of aggravated identity theft, 18 U. S. C....
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