WhatFinger


USA vs. YOU: The flood of criminal laws threatening your liberty

Nuisance laws make criminals of us all



Just as it is getting harder and harder to keep criminals in jail, a new booklet “USA vs. YOU: The flood of criminal laws threatening your liberty” by the Washington-based Heritage Foundation demonstrates it is becoming more difficult for regular Americans to stay out of jail.

Support Canada Free Press


One symptom of the trend is how lawmakers stopped using the word “willingly” in legislation and regularly ignore the concept of “criminal intent” from state and federal laws. The result is that regular folks accidentally violate statues and pay for it with fines and jail.
  • One of the examples in the booklet is the 2000 case of 12-year-old Ansche Hedgepath, caught eating a fry on a Washington Metro subway platform on her way home from school.

    The Metro has a strict no-eat, no-drink policy. How strict? Well, a Metro police officer saw the girl eat the fry and immediately arrested her, taking her out of the subway station to the juvenile station in cuffs.

    The girl’s mother Tracey Hedgepath was so incensed, she challenged the arrest and fought the case in the courts, where the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld both the small fry’s arrest and citation.
  • Ocie Mills and his son Carey bought waterfront property in Escombie Bay, Fla. The two men collected all of the appropriate permits and began to build their dream home. The dream became a nightmare after the Environment Protection Agency caught wind of the project and declared their dry land a “wetland” and charged the pair with violating the Clean Water Act.

    Still, for an agency famous for shutting down Mills, the 21 months of federal time these Mills served was just a drop in the bucket.
  • Another accident criminal is Gary Harrington, who dug out three ponds on his Eagle Point, Ore., property to manage runoff from rainwater and melting snow. Harrington found out the hard way that the state of Oregon owns all precipitation once it hits the ground—unless it is captured in a rain barrel.

    When he learned he had stolen the people’s rain, Harrington applied for and received the correct permits. But, it was too good an ending for this story. In its clouded judgment, the state revoked the permits revoked soon after they were granted and ordered Harrington to drain the ponds, pay a $1,500 fine and spend 30 days in state lock-up.
  • Then, there was the guy who tried to impress his girlfriend by releasing 12 red heart helium-filled balloons too close to an animal refuge; the father and son, who found an ancient arrowhead on federal land and the Michigan woman charged with babysitting for neighbors for free.
Finally Congress is starting to act. At the June 14 of the hearing of the House’s Over-criminalization Task Force, Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte (R.-Va.), the chairman of the House’s Judiciary Committee and the task force’s leader illustrated the problem with the story of the case of the three-time Indianapolis 500 winner Bobby Unser. “While snowmobiling near his home, an unexpected snowstorm forced Unser and a friend to seek refuge in a barn,” he said. “While trying to escape the storm, they unwittingly went into a National Forest Wilderness Area.  They spent two days and nights in sub-zero weather – eating snow to slake their thirst – before being rescued.” The Indy 500 champion nearly died, Goodlatte said, and after he called the Forest Service for help finding his snowmobile, he was charged with illegal operation of a snowmobile in a restricted wilderness area. “I am confident Congress never intended to subject someone in Unser’s situation to criminal liability. However, stories like this have become all too typical,” the congressman said. Pushing Congress to act is Criminal Law Reform Coalition, a collection of strange bedfellows joining Heritage that includes: The American Civil Liberties Union, The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Texas Public Policy Foundation. President Ulysses S. Grant said the best way to get rid of bad laws was to enforce them. Let’s hope that is what the liberals have done—otherwise, we are all looking at cuffs.


View Comments

Neil W. McCabe -- Bio and Archives

Neil W. McCabe is the editor of Human Event’s “Guns & Patriots” e-letter and was a senior reporter at the Human Events newspaper. McCabe deployed with the Army Reserve to Iraq for 15 months as a combat historian. For many years, he was a reporter and photographer for “The Pilot,” Boston’s Catholic paper. He was also the editor of two free community papers, “The Somerville (Mass.) News and “The Alewife (North Cambridge, Mass.).”


Sponsored