Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent
Horace recommends this book
The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes
to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that
he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The
answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which
have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague.
In
Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal
laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law
tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one
of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of
federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute
books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing
federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex
and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets.
The
dangers spelled out in Three Felonies a Day do not apply solely to
“white collar criminals,” state and local politicians, and
professionals. No social class or profession is safe from this troubling
form of social control by the executive branch, and nothing less than
the integrity of our constitutional democracy hangs in the balance.
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