No one is safe from this legal madness

Guilty no matter the intent
Examiner Editorial May 9, 2010

In May of 2004, federal agents in a black sport utility vehicle ran Krister Evertson off the road, piled out of their vehicle in full SWAT gear, trained an automatic weapon at his head, and arrested him. Evertson's crime? He failed to put a federally mandated sticker on a UPS package. A jury acquitted Evertson of the charges, but the feds later charged Evertson for "abandoning" hazardous material. Evertson is an award-winning scientist working on fuel-cell technology, and the chemicals were both properly stored and necessary for his work. Nonetheless, he spent 21 months in federal prison.
Chances are that you, too, could become a federal criminal like Evertson. In 1998, the American Bar Association estimated there were more than 3,000 federal criminal offenses in the 50 titles of the United States Code. By 2007, the total reached 4,450. With so many laws on the books, it becomes nearly impossible in many cases for prosecutors to prove the defendant's mens rea, literally "guilty mind." But proving a defendant's criminal intent has long been one of the pillars of our legal system. Yet the fact that Congress couldn't care less is amply demonstrated in a new study jointly produced by the Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, "Without Intent: How Congress Is Eroding the Criminal Intent Requirement in Federal Law."
Legal scholars Brian Walsh and Tiffany Joslyn document that the 109thCongress (2005-2006) proposed "446 criminal offenses that did not involve violence, firearms, drugs and drug trafficking, pornography, or immigration violations." From 2000 to 2007, Congress enacted 452 entirely new crimes from 2000 through 2007, more than one a week. Walsh and Joslyn further observe that of the 446 proposed new federal crimes in the 109thCongress, less than half were sent to either the House or Senate judiciary committees for review. Without such review, many of the proposals are so vague, far-reaching, and imprecise that, "few lawyers, much less non-lawyers, could determine what specific conduct they prohibit and punish," according to Walsh and Joslyn. The surprise here is that the 109thCongress enacted only 23 three new laws without adequatemens rea requirements.
The study offers five common-sense recommendations to Congress for solving this problem, including:
¥ Enact default rules of interpretation ensuring that criminal intent requirements are adequate to protect against unjust conviction.
¥ Codify the rule of lenity, which grants defendants the benefit of the doubt when Congress fails to legislate clearly.
¥ Require adequate judiciary committee oversight of every bill proposing criminal offenses or penalties.
¥ Provide detailed written justification for and analysis of all new federal criminalization.
¥ Redouble efforts to draft every federal criminal offense clearly and precisely.