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Hinkle: Commit any felonies lately?
 As Bart Hinkle at the Richmond Times-Dispatch explains, it's easier than you think.
For our recent commenter Lex: try to square that circle when you talk about how much more 'free' we are... |
| Tale end of a longer article. We were discussing this yesterday. I'll be discussing it until approximately Doomsday. |
[TIMESDISPATCH] As The Wall Street Journal has reported, lawmakers in Washington have greatly eroded the notion of mens rea -- the principle that you need criminal intent in order to commit a crime. Thanks to a proliferating number of obscure offenses, Americans now resemble the condemned souls in Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" -- spared from perdition only by the temporary forbearance of those who sit in judgment.
"What once might have been considered simply a mistake," The Journal explains, is now "punishable by jail time." And as 20-year-old Elizabeth Daly has now learned, you can go to jail even when the person making the mistake wasn't you.
Posted by: Fred & Steve White 2013-07-06 |
