Category: crime and punishment

crime and punishment initiative, referendum, and recall

No Part Justice

Dr. Annette Bosworth was convicted last week on twelve felony counts. She now faces as many as 24 years in prison, $48,000 in fines … and the likely loss of her medical license.

Her crime? She circulated six nominating petitions to get on the South Dakota ballot in 2014. Thirty-seven people signed — at her medical office and at a Hutterite colony (where she sees patients) — while she was on a medical mission to help typhoon victims in the Philippines.

Dr. Bosworth’s sister was one.

But the affidavit on the petition reads that the circulator must actually witness each person’s signature being affixed. Bosworth should not have signed it.

Hence six counts of perjury and six more, one for each false document filed.

In court, Bosworth testified that her attorney — who legally notarized the petitions — told her she met the legal definition of a circulator.

Last month, I traveled to South Dakota to release a Citizens in Charge Foundation report on this prosecution. One key finding? While the threatened penalty is the most severe any American has ever faced in a petition-related case, Dr. Bosworth submitted signatures of people she knew and who very much did support her. No forgery, no fraud … against the voters.

In response, the state’s largest newspaper reported that, “[Attorney General Marty] Jackley said that it’s ‘well understood in state law’ that the offenses Bosworth faces are punishable by probation and not jail time.” Then after her conviction, Jackley suggested a presumption for “either no or limited actual jail time,” adding, “but that presumption can be overcome by a defendant’s conduct.”

Annette Bosworth should be held accountable. But aiming to ruin her life isn’t any part of justice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Annette Bosworth, Dr. Annette Bosworth, justice, law

crime and punishment education and schooling folly general freedom too much government

Under Their Thumb

What if police grabbed your children off the street and held them for five hours?

Alexander and Danielle Meitiv of Silver Spring, Maryland, have been investigated three times. First, when their children were discovered playing by themselves in a park a block from their home. The second time when police picked up the kids walking home from a park about a mile away. The third investigation was launched when the Meitiv’s 10-year-old son and 6‑year-old daughter were arrested and held for five hours for walking home from a different park.

Nothing came of the first investigation. In the second, CPS originally found the couple guilty of “unsubstantiated neglect.” But last week, the Meitivs received a letter from Maryland’s Child Protective Services (CPS) now ruling out neglect in the second investigation.

Gee whiz, it’s good news. But the Meitivs still have investigation No. 3 to contend with. And CPS remains completely mum on whether the agency’s letter means the Meitivs and other parents can now freely allow their kids to walk to and from public parks and other venues.

Or not.

Can we really live in the “Land of the Free” and our children not be free to walk in public? What kind of freedom is that?

If the Constitution isn’t sufficient to stop police and child welfare [sic] agencies from snatching kids off the street, terrifying them, investigating their parents and threatening to take those children, we need to pass new laws granting children the right to walk down the street …

… as long as it’s okay with their parents.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags children, constitution, free range, kids, law

Accountability crime and punishment

Judge by the Results

The law exists to ensure responsibility. When someone does wrong, the police and courts are here to correct for the lapses and crimes.

That’s how law “holds us responsible” for our actions.

The War on Drugs is fought, it has been argued, because recreational drug use makes people irresponsible. So police and courts must punish, etc., etc.

But Theory must be judged not on intent, but on results.

Which are too often atrocious.

When I wrote about Bounkham “Bou-Bou” Phonesavanh before — a toddler horribly maimed and almost killed by an incendiary during a completely fruitless drug raid on a home full of innocents — I identified the War on Drugs as the root problem: “Waging that war permits endless ‘botched raids’ like the one that almost killed Bou Bou,” I wrote last February. “So long as such invasions remain a standard means of trying to catch dealers with their stash — indeed, so long as the War on Drugs is being waged at all — innocent persons will always be needlessly at risk.…”

Now that the trial is over and the family has been rewarded not quite a million bucks in recompense, we can see, clearly, what’s wrong here.

Irresponsibility.

The police who did the foul deed? Unrepentant in court, offering bizarre excuses. What the police assailants claimed, the Pro Libertate blog summarized, “is that while he was sleeping, Baby Bou-Bou ambushed them.” An overstatement? Perhaps — but very slight.

Meanwhile, who pays? The taxpayers. Not the guilty cops.

If we continue to allow this “war” we will continue getting unaccountable policing and the tragedies that necessarily result.

In a word: irresponsibility.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags crime, Drug War, justice, trial

crime and punishment folly general freedom tax policy

Thieves Caught, Return Loot

Post author By CS Admin
Post date May 18, 2015
4 Comments on Thieves Caught, Return Loot

Lyndon McLellan, a convenience store owner, was robbed. The marauders took $107,000 of his honestly earned money.

We don’t need the police to find out who did it (and no, the police themselves are not the culprit, not this time). The IRS took the money, suspecting that he “structured” his bank deposits to avoid reporting requirements. McLellan’s niece, responsible for making deposits, had followed a teller’s (bad) advice to deposit the money in such a way as to avoid paperwork. The IRS noticed the “too small” deposits and looted the account despite having no indication that the funds were ill-gotten.

“It took me 13 years to save that much money,” McLellan says, “and it took fewer than 13 seconds for the government to take it away.”

This, even though the IRS had recently promised not to summarily nab account contents solely for alleged “structuring.”

At first, the government offered to settle with McLellan by returning one half the money, their standard (and outrageous) offer in such cases. But neither McLellan nor the Institute for Justice — the champions of property rights helping him with the case — accepted the government’s “deal.”

Last week, the IRS dropped the case and agreed to return their booty. But only the principal. No interest, no attorney fees (for McLellan’s first lawyer), none of the $19,000 McLellan paid an accountant to prove his innocence.

IJ will continue to litigate. We can hope that the IRS will continue to lose.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags IRS, tax, tax policy, theft

crime and punishment general freedom too much government

The Right to Ignore Leviathan

Post author By CS Admin
Post date May 15, 2015
6 Comments on The Right to Ignore Leviathan

Charles Murray, author of Losing Ground and other controversial books, has a suggestion. For business people. Pillars of the community. Fine, upstanding citizens.

Civil disobedience.

He’s suggesting, says John Stossel, that we ignore the parts of government that don’t make any sense, all the nonsense in the big books of the regulatory state.

Murray’s done this in his latest, intriguingly titled book, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission. Stossel discusses it on reason.com:

Murray says, correctly, that no ordinary human being — not even a team of lawyers — can ever be sure how to obey the 810 pages of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, 1,024 pages of the Affordable Care Act or 2,300 pages of Dodd-Frank.

What if we all stopped trying? The government can’t put everyone in jail.

This is a provocative idea, even if not new.

Henry David Thoreau spent a night in jail for not paying the poll tax, a tax that helped pay for the Mexican war he so despised (and was right to despise). Thoreau eloquently argued for civil disobedience in such cases; Herbert Spencer did something similar, in his 1851 Social Statics, with the chapter “The Right to Ignore the State.”

It is a risky tactic, of course. Thoreau was, after all, incarcerated for that night. You could wind up spending more time in the hoosegow.

Still, it could be worth it. Civil disobedience has good effects. Stossel cites “historian Thaddeus Russell [who] reminds us that many freedoms we take for granted exist not because the government graciously granted liberties to us but because of lawbreakers.”

It’s another path for citizen-initiated reform.

And it’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Charles Murray, civil disobedience, Dodd-Frank, law, laws, Losing Ground

crime and punishment general freedom government transparency judiciary national politics & policies

Court Vindicates Snowden

Sometimes if you postpone something long enough, someone else will do the job.

Last week, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled the National Security Agency’s metadata collection program unlawful, I immediately saw it as a vindication of Edward Snowden and his “illegal” leaks.

It will be hard to charge the man with treason for uncovering programs that have been determined, in court, to be themselves treasonous — or at least unconstitutional.

But I was busy last week; didn’t have time to make the case.

Nicely, Noah Feldman made it for me, at Bloomberg View. “This is the most serious blow to date,” writes Feldman in his May 7 article, a blow against “the legacy of the USA Patriot Act and the surveillance overreach that followed 9/11.”

The linkage with Snowden is in no way an imposition on the story:

The first striking thing about the court’s opinion was how openly it relied on Snowden’s revelations of classified material. The court described how the program was known — by Snowden’s leaks. It also analyzed the NSA order to Verizon, leaked by Snowden, that proved the existence of the program and revealed indirectly the legal reasoning that the government relied on to authorize the metadata collection.

More importantly, Feldman recognizes that the decision rightly breaks “the bad precedent of secret law created by the NSA.”

A republic isn’t a republic if its laws are secret.

Now, of course, it’s time for Americans to cease their procrastination. If we don’t recognize that our government is out of control, no one else’s determination will matter.

Except, perhaps, history’s.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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