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Related to @FirmWeird's post here Do most people really commit Three Felonies a Day? I basically agree with the thesis that the Byzantine law system can manufacture criminality from very little and that innocent people can be prosecuted accordingly. Nonetheless, I am modestly confident that even maximally bad-faith scrutiny of my typical day would not result in three felonies, or even a single felony. Perhaps I live an unusually low-risk life, but I'm not really seeing the path to doing some entirely legal work, buying some groceries, going for a run, and watching some basketball on my legally licensed cable television including any felonies. I can easily believe that some point I have done something that could get me in trouble, even if I don't realize it, but this does not seem like a typical day to me.
A simple example might be the Lacey Act of 1900. It prohibits import, export, transport, purchase, or sale of species of wildlife, fish, timber, and plants, if that would violate any state, federal, tribal, or foreign law. Since it's so extremely broad it makes it basically impossible to predict what will be legal or not, and could plausibly result in you theoretically committing a very large amount of crimes every day.
If the state really, really wanted to ruin your day and had no qualms about the poor optics they could totally find some obscure law about oak wood in Botswana and nab you for it.
Interesting, but doesn't seem to be a felony. The original act just lays out fines, while the 2008 bill adds felonies to some other codes, but not the Lacey Act. Probably. It's really hard for me to be sure if I covered everything.
Edit: after reviewing the modern version of the act, I don't think any of my daily activities would constitute Lacey felonies. They seem to require import/export or value over $350, and in both cases, knowledge of the violation. So buying oak furniture would probably be fine, unless you have reason to believe Botswana really does outlaw it?
The Lacey Act can and has been used in felony contexts. This is a more readable version of the current law.
I'm confused about what makes something a felony. I've seen acts that call it out specifically, and there are clearly laws which use it as an object. This one has sections like
Is it just the length of sentence? The provisions with penalties greater than one year are
§3373 (d) (1) (A), knowing imports and exports
§3373 (d) (1) (B), knowing sale/purchase/intent thereof for more than $350
§3373 (d) (3), making false labels or importing without a declaration
§3373 (d) (4), interacting with captive, prohibited wildlife
If those are the felonies, I think my grocery-store trip is probably safe. Maybe the average American only commits 3 felonies a day because of Felonies Georg.
Edit: just clicked up to see your review. It sounds like Selectively-Prosecuted Georg is exactly what Silvergate was going for.
For most purposes at federal law, a felony is any crime punishable by more than a year imprisonment, regardless of the actual sentencing. Historically, this would be the source of a lot of 'year-and-a-day' statutory penalties. State law varies: some state exactly mirror the federal definition, while others can be goofy (Massachusetts considers any crime with any prison sentence to be a felony, while any sentence at a house of corrections is a misdemeanor, with the line usually triggering around two or three years).
((This can be somewhat goofy for corporate liability. In the Founding era and up to the start of the Civil War, law held that corporations couldn't commit felonies, just their individual actors in their individual capacities. Over time, that stopped being a reasonable assumption. In the modern era, the federal Sentencing Guidelines have 'organizational' sentencing recommendations for felony crimes commonly committed by corporations which tend to commute the sentences to (high) dollar values; felonies not covered by those sections can have a judge pick anything within the statute's range that sounds remotely reasonable.))
Prosecutors largely have kept the Lacey Act from being too much of a nightmare for normies thanks to cautious application, but the bar for "knowing" is a lot lower than you'd expect, since it's been applied in cases where even many people from the country in question's government debated whether the law covered the specific matter at hand, and where the defendant claimed to not know of the law. It'd be somewhat hard to hit d(1)B on the typical grocery shopping trip yet (though in a couple decades of inflation...) but d(1)A and d(3) could cover a wider variety of Amazon purchases than you'd expect, especially since the there are no thresholds.
In practice, no prosecutor's going to go after someone for ten or thirty dollars of pen blanks (I have no idea what the legal status on these things are, though I have reasons to distrust some vendor statements), both out of pragmatic concern and because courts have largely read the "due care" standard to make consumer prosecutions too annoying, but the law can and has been applied in cases close to that but larger-scale.
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