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Sunday, July 24, 2011
Law - Indiana's criminal laws may be in better shape than fed's
Gary Fields and John R. Emshwiller report in the Wall Street Journal in this (perhaps $$$) story that the feds cannot even count all the federal crimes. The story begins:
WASHINGTON—For decades, the task of counting the total number of federal criminal laws has bedeviled lawyers, academics and government officials.That is just the start of the article, which is a companion piece to another story, "As Criminal Laws Proliferate, More Are Ensnared"," featured today in the Sentencing Law Blog."You will have died and resurrected three times," and still be trying to figure out the answer, said Ronald Gainer, a retired Justice Department official.
In 1982, while at the Justice Department, Mr. Gainer oversaw what still stands as the most comprehensive attempt to tote up a number. The effort came as part of a long and ultimately failed campaign to persuade Congress to revise the criminal code, which by the 1980s was scattered among 50 titles and 23,000 pages of federal law.
Justice Department lawyers undertook "the laborious counting" of the scattered statutes "for the express purpose of exposing the idiocy" of the system, said Mr. Gainer, now 76 years old.
It can often be very difficult to make a call whether or not something counts as a single crime or many.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 24, 2011 08:20 PM
Posted to General Law Related