By ROY MAYNNARD
Congressman Louie Gohmert's got it right. He knows that limited government means just that - limits on government's involvement in our lives. The usual tendency of lawmakers is to, well, make laws - more and more of them, encompassing wider and wider swaths of American life. Many carry criminal penalties, with fewer of them requiring "criminal intent" in order for a person to be guilty.
In a new bipartisan effort, Gohmert is helping to lead a fight against overcriminalization.
"This is a very important issue," Gohmert said on Tuesday. "For too long people in both parties have found it convenient to criminalize civil violations because they thought it would help them look tougher. I was never considered soft on crime as a district judge back in Texas."
Yet not everything should be labeled a crime, he says.
"People have said, 'I am afraid if we don't put a prison term on a violation it will look like we are soft on crime.' But if it is not a crime and there is not criminal intent, then the federal government should look very hard before it undertakes that endeavor," Gohmert said.
That's an important issue - criminal intent. Proving "mens rea," as it's known in the law, used to be a necessary component of any prosecution.
That's not so anymore.
"Honest, hard-working Americans doing their best to be respectable, law-abiding citizens can no longer be assured that they are safe from federal prosecutors," says a report from the Heritage Foundation. "Federal criminal law used to focus on inherently wrongful conduct: treason, murder, counterfeiting, and the like. Today, an unimaginably broad range of socially and economically beneficial conduct is criminalized. More and more Americans who are otherwise law-abiding are being trapped and unjustly punished."
Most of them never have any intention of breaking the law.
"The Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers reported in May the results of a joint study finding that three of every five new nonviolent offenses lack a criminal-intent requirement that is adequate to protect from unjust criminal punishment. Americans who engaged in conduct that they did not know was illegal or otherwise wrongful," the report says.
Note that combination - the conservative Heritage Foundation and the left-leaning NACDL. Other groups are also joining.
"When you see the Heritage Foundation and the ACLU come together on an issue, you know that this is something that demands attention," Gohmert said.
He also cited some specific cases.
"One witness was convicted in a U.S. court for violating Honduran shipping regulations - one of which had been repealed several years prior," Gohmert said. "The Honduran government supported the defendant at trial but he was still found guilty.? These tragic cases undermine the faith that people should have in their government I can tell you that some of these laws stretch my faith in the federal government as well."?
Overcriminalization comes from those most dangerous of words, "somebody should do something." There are plenty of crimes being committed by real criminals that need prosecuting. Diverting scarce resources to prosecute innocent Americans who simply broke some byzantine rules they knew nothing about is worse than wasteful. It's downright criminal.
