One ordinarily thinks of conservatives as being “law and order” types, always siding with federal prosecutors trying to put the scofflaws in jail.
Some might be surprised therefore to find the Heritage Foundation, a pre-eminent conservative think tank in the nation’s capitol, joining forces with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and six other prominent legal groups from across the political spectrum, to oppose over-zealous federal prosecutors. Heritage dubs the effort its Over-Criminalization Project.
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Others in the coalition with Heritage and the criminal defense lawyers are the American Civil Liberties Union, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Federalist Society, the American Bar Association, the Cato Institute and the Constitution Project.
A measure of the weight Heritage attaches to the project is that one of its most important leaders, former Reagan-administration Attorney General Ed Meese, heads it up. Meese is Heritage’s Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow and director of the foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.
Meese explains that what’s involved is the quintessentially conservative goal of keeping government within limits.
“Our ultimate goal,” he said, “is to restore the criminal law to what it has traditionally been used for. That is, to protect the public safety and to deal with real crime – and to avoid what has occurred, which is the multiplicity of laws and regulations that carry criminal penalties which have ensnared ordinary, law-abiding citizens in the criminal process for things that nobody would anticipate are actually crimes.”
“What has happened,” he continued, “is that a lot of special interest groups have urged Congress to attach criminal penalties to regulatory legislation to, quote, ‘show its importance.’… Therefore the criminal process is being abused when normal civil proceedings or administrative actions would suffice to protect public health and safety.”
There was the case where seafood importers spent eight years in jail because their lobsters were improperly packed in plastic rather than cardboard. “Zero tolerance” policies that land children in jail for making paper guns in school or having small knives in the trunk of their cars on campus after moving some boxes that needed opening. The 61-year-old cancer patient sent to jail because her hedges were too high. Law enforcement run amuck, again and again and again.
Meese said many of the worst examples involve obscure environmental regulations or rules for businesses. Krister Evertson unknowingly stumbled into both sorts of infractions.
“We hear about thousands of cases and we have to choose very carefully which ones we investigate and follow up on,” said Andrew Grossman, a senior legal policy analyst at Heritage and the point man on the Evertson case.
“Krister Evertson’s case attracted us because Krister is someone who is an inventor and an innovator, someone who is trying to live out the American dream, and he ran right into the criminal law. This is a more and more common barrier for entrepreneurs in American today and Krister’s case typifies the risks that they face,” Grossman said. — Quin Hillyer
