Tag: police state

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crime and punishment

Pardon All the Non-Criminals

laws, police state, authoritarianism, totalitarian

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is pardoning mask and social-​distancing scofflaws.

He says the pandemic mitigation rules amount to overreach. “These things with health should be advisory, they should not be punitive.”

I agree. But could he (and other governors) do more to help non-criminals?

At Reason​.com, Billy Binion argues that there’s lots of over-​criminalization that DeSantis could tackle. Consider the drug war. If you’re arrested in Florida for possessing up to 20 grams of pot, you “face a $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison”; more than 25 grams, three to 15 years in the hoosegow.

DeSantis rejects the idea of legalizing recreational cannabis, so his “overreach” critique of public health law is limited.

Severely. 

Yet it is not as if the states don’t take numerous punitive actions against persons guilty only of naivety, carelessness, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time:

  • Depending on the state, it can be a bad idea to drive down the road with guns you legally own in your car trunk.
  • Collecting signatures for an initiative petition has sometimes been treated as a prison-​worthy offense.
  • It can be a lousy idea to carry your life savings in the form of cash if there is any chance an official might notice and confiscate it. 

That latter problem, of civil asset forfeiture, would be tricky to fix at the back end, since if you’re not arrested for having the money, you can’t exactly be pardoned. But surely chief executives could take other actions to right such obvious wrongs.

Any state governor (or president) could do worse than spend, say, half of his or her time issuing pardons and finding other ways to help people caught by unjust government snares.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense

You Picked on the Wrong Guys

Blazing trails can be fun and exciting. But sooner or later, along come the folks who want to put a damper on things. Regulate you. Even threaten you.

So it is with the wide open spaces of the Internet, where people go to speak their minds.

A website about New York politics called Room 8 received a subpoena from Bronx prosecutors, trying to force the publishers to help identify persons blogging at the site anonymously.

Such an attempt might be reasonable. Maybe it could help catch some criminal. As Ben Smith, a co-​founder of Room 8, puts it, “Was somebody found face-​down on their keyboard and the I.P. address was going to help identify the killer?”

Smith called the district attorney’s office to try to get more information. None was given. Not only that, the subpoena spoke ominously about how disclosure of the “very existence” of the subpoena would “impede the investigation.” Obstructing an investigation … can’t that can get you thrown in jail yourself?

Scary stuff.

If governments get away with such tactics, bloggers would be prevented from exercising their most potent weapon to fight injustice: anonymity. Anonymous writing helped foment the American Revolution. Letting governments, today, suppress such free speech amounts to a repudiation of this American idea.

The founders of Room 8 got themselves some lawyers. The subpoena, fortunately, has been withdrawn. Still no word on what the crime was.

Maybe speaking out of turn?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.