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Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 16, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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.