In May of 2004, federal agents in a black sport utility vehicle ran Krister Evertson off the road, piled out of their vehicle in full SWAT gear, trained an automatic weapon at his head, and arrested him. Evertson’s crime? He failed to put a federally mandated sticker on a UPS package. A jury acquitted Evertson of the charges, but the feds later charged Evertson for “abandoning” hazardous material. Evertson is an award-winning scientist working on fuel-cell technology, and the chemicals were both properly stored and necessary for his work. Nonetheless, he spent 21 months in federal prison.
Chances are that you, too, could become a federal criminal like Evertson. In 1998, the American Bar Association estimated there were more than 3,000 federal criminal offenses in the 50 titles of the United States Code. By 2007, the total reached 4,450. With so many laws on the books, it becomes nearly impossible in many cases for prosecutors to prove the defendant’s mens rea, literally “guilty mind.” But proving a defendant’s criminal intent has long been one of the pillars of our legal system. Yet the fact that Congress couldn’t care less is amply demonstrated in a new study jointly produced by the Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, “Without Intent: How Congress Is Eroding the Criminal Intent Requirement in Federal Law.”
