Litigation

Heritage and NACDL: Without Intent

By James R. Copland

As the AP reports, last week the Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers released a joint report entitled Without Intent: How Congress Is Eroding the Criminal Intent Requirement in Federal Law. This study looks empirically at a phenomenon my colleague Marie Gryphon wrote about last December in her paper, It's a Crime?: Flaws in Federal Statutes That Punish Standard Business Practice: the erosion of mens rea standards in the criminal law. According to the new study, among 446 new non-violent crimes proposed in the 109th Congress (a number itself shockingly revealing of the growth of federal criminal law), 57 percent lacked adequate mens rea provisions. And during the 109th Congress, 23 new non-violent crimes without mens rea standards were enacted into law.

In related news:

• Laurie Levenson reviews Tim Lynch's recent book, In The Name of Justice: Leading Experts Reexamine the Classic Article "The Aims of the Criminal Law," in the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review;


• The Institute for Justice has released a new report, Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture; and


• The Heritage Foundation has a new video to go with its recent book One Nation Under Arrest (to which I contributed a short chapter on criminal law in New York).

Full post as published by Point of Law on May 14, 2010 (boomark / email).