| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 5 days ago |
| > If I believe, in good faith, I have not broken the law. I should not be convicted How often does this actually happen in criminal matters? |
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| ▲ | ty6853 5 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Jeremy Kettler -- bought a silencer completely made and sold within his state (no interstate commerce) and believed based on the Kansas Second Amendment Act (I think that was the name) which legalized intrastate NFA items that it was 100% legal. His own state representatives had advertised to their constituents that the law exempted silencers that never crossed state boundaries. The buyer and seller did it openly and even had photos on facebook, seemingly totally oblivious this would actually still touch federal law / interstate commerce. Cody Wilson -- Went to a sugar daddy website that verifies IDs to ensure all 'escorts' are 18 which is a pretty good faith way to do it IMO. Woman seemingly had fake ID at some point, and also lied and turned out to be like 16 or 17. At some point later she underwent counseling at school and admitted she was an escort, after which a criminal investigation happened and Mr. Wilson was arrested. As a strict liability crime, there was no defense that due diligence was done to ensure the escort was 18. |
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| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 5 days ago | parent [-] | | The SAFA case is complicated, granted, and rare; it reached the appellate circuit for a reason. CSAM and child sexual assault are one of the few areas of criminal law where we confer (in my opinion, correctly) absolute liability. Broadly speaking, I think more cops have been convicted of duty-related crimes than unsuspecting random convicted of and punished for a crime they didn’t know they committed. | | |
| ▲ | ty6853 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | These kind of convictions aren't rare in the firearms domain. People get arrested or convicted all the time for doing stuff they had no idea was illegal. More recently a Navy Sailor (Patrick Adamiak) in the pipeline to be a SEAL was convicted after selling an imported parts kit that had been destroyed per ATF guidelines from the early 2000s. But apparently when he resold it, (after buying it openly from gunbroker), the ATF decided the way the kit was cut up was wrong and put him away for 20 years. Oh yes they had a few other excuses -- he had a decomissioned RPG tube, so the ATF just put an entirely other gun inside the fucking tube and fired it to claim it still work. In that case, even the Navy, which almost never does this to felons, terminated him with an honorable discharge and even let him run up all his liberty time before releiving him. | |
| ▲ | milesrout 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Absolute liability is unquestionably completely wrong. It is punishing someone despite his not having had any kind of guilty state of mind. It creates criminal liability for something that is completely beyond the defendant's control. Nothing could be a greater abuse. What justification do you have for the view that it is right that in some US states you can be convicted of a crime despite never having done anything wrong, with no negligence, no recklessness, no intent, no knowledge, nothing? Because that goes against the most fundamental precept of criminal law: the requirement of both actus reus and mens rea. With no guilty mind there is no criminal liability. |
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| ▲ | RHSeeger 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Hide some drugs in someone's luggage when they're traveling at an airport and then get back to me. There's tons of cases of people being arrested for things they either had no idea they doing or had no idea was illegal. And then even more where the police tack on lots of charges for someone that's already been arrested; for things that they had no idea they were a problem in the first place. |
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| ▲ | autoexec 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Hell, there are tons of examples of people being arrested for things that aren't crimes at all, and even for acts that are constitutionally protected. Police don't care because they know they'll get away with it (and might even get a paid vacation) when the case against the person who was arrested and likely lost their job as a result gets thrown out. If the unlawfully arrested person is lucky and/or wealthy enough to afford a good lawyer they might get a decent amount of tax payer money out of it. |
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| ▲ | mjd 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's a perfectly reasonable defense to a charge of mail fraud, for example. Or employing illegal aliens. "But they told me they had work visas, and they showed me what later turned out to be expertly-counterfeited visas!" Why shouldn't that get you off the hook, if true? |
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| ▲ | dan-robertson 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I have this vague impression that a certain amount of intent, but (a) I think it’s more about intending to do the bad thing than knowing that the bad thing is illegal, and (b) this is all very vague so I could be totally wrong. |
