Individuals who commit crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, fraud, or assault should be punished to the full extent of the law. But what of the honest citizen who unintentionally breaks a statute he didn’t even realize existed?
Increasingly, regulatory agencies are applying criminal penalties to infractions of measures many people and businesses didn’t even realize existed. Paul Larkin of the Heritage foundation has criticized this practice, known as “overcriminalization.” It’s a particular problem with overbearing federal agencies.
Larkin provides several examples:
“Abner Schoenwetter, for example, spent six years in a federal prison for importing Honduran lobsters that were packed in plastic—as opposed to cardboard—boxes and for supposedly violating a Honduran regulation (later declared invalid by the Honduran Attorney General) that made his lobsters marginally too small.
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“Lawrence Lewis, a building engineer, wound up charged with a felony and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for following the procedure he had been instructed to use to clean up toilet overflows at a military retirement home that, totally unbeknownst to him, wound up shunting the refuse into the Potomac River.”
According to the Heritage study, “The increasing use of criminal laws as regulatory penalties amplifies the risk that people, especially those who own or manage small businesses, may be deterred from pursuing legitimate activities due to the fear that they could commit a crime by unwittingly crossing one of the many obscure lines drawn by statutes, regulations, and ordinances.”
As the federal bureaucracy grows increasingly large and increasingly intrusive in our daily affairs, the risk of incurring criminal penalties for activities that seem completely innocent grows ever greater. This is an issue which requires immediate attention in Washington.