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Bills That Increase Criminalization
- Public Corruption
S.1946
Dramatically expands venue availability for host of public corruption offenses; allows government to prove bribery through course-of-conduct; allows government to prove gratuities offense without regard to a particular official act; expands mail and wire fraud statutes to include money, property, or "any thing of value"; expands statute of limitations for most public corruption and white collar crimes to 6 years.
- Consumer Product Safety Commission Reform Act of 2007
S. 2045
Amends Consumer Product Safety Act to increase civil fines to up to $100 million and adds the criminal penalty of prison time for up to 1 year for “knowing” violations and 5 years for “knowing and willful” violations; allows for suits by State AG’s for damages, restitution, or “other compensation”; provides whistleblower protections which allow employees to collect up to $25 million of any civil penalty applied against a company.
- Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2008
H 3093
Amendment 3276, introduced by Dorgan, would amend federal restitution to include pre-trial restraints of substitute assets, which could seriously hinder a defendant’s ability to retain counsel; requires only that the government show the defendant is charged with a felony for which restitution may be appropriate; procedure for challenging the order is inadequate and burdensome.
- Federal False Claims Act Corrections Act of 2007
S. 2041
Eliminates the requirement that qui tam relators (“whistleblowers”) must be the “original source” of the information on which False Claim Act (FCA) suits are based in order to receive a portion of any quasi-criminal monetary penalties awarded, allows FCA suits to be based on claims presented to private parties if they receive federal funds, expands the FCA’s coverage to false claims involving money foreign governments received from the United States, and reduces the Justice Department’s ability to oversee and control cases brought by qui tam relators.
Bills That Mitigate Overcriminalization
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Federalization of Crimes Uniform Standards Act of 2001
(H.R.
1998)
This Bill introduced by Representative Manzullo would have created a federal
commission to examine the over-federalization of criminal law and required
Congress to assess the federal/state impact of any criminal legislation.
We will urge that this bill be reintroduced.
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Over-Criminalization of Social and Economic Conduct
The origin of modern criminal law can be traced
to early feudal times. From its inception, the criminal law expressed both
a moral and a practical judgment about the societal consequences of certain
activity: to be a crime, the law required that an individual must both cause
(or attempt to cause) a wrongful injury and do so with some form of malicious
intent. Classically, lawyers capture this insight in two
principles...
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