DL Truth: Distance Learning Truth

Want to compete with the wealthy higher ed cartel?  Can't afford to buy an existing floundering RA operation?  Thinking about starting your own DL school in a cheaper overseas venue instead?  That's a crime, you know.  Ask Dixie.  She took three to avoid eight on trumped up charges.  Feeling safer?  The higher ed cartel is.

Quote:Wasted lives, wasted money: The offense of overcriminalization

By Jim E. Lavine - 09/24/10 03:56 PM ET
  
Small businessman Abner “Abbie” Schoenwetter, a Florida seafood broker who is now 64, could have spent the last decade growing his business, contributing to the economy and the tax base, preparing for retirement, and enjoying liberty and happiness with his wife and three children. Instead, beginning with a grand jury indictment ten years ago, Mr. Schoenwetter’s real life became a surreal tale lifted from the pages of a Kafka novel.

Schoenwetter, who had no prior criminal history, was indicted and convicted on charges relating to lobsters he had agreed to purchase that, according to U.S. authorities, violated three Honduran administrative regulations. The U.S. claimed that, under Honduran law, there were undersized lobsters and lobsters with eggs in the shipment, and that the lobsters had been packaged in plastic, not regulation cardboard. The Honduran authorities, including the Honduran Attorney General, advised U.S. law enforcement authorities and the court that this effort to punish Schoenwetter and others under the Lacey Act for violating Honduran regulations was misplaced – the regulations in question had been declared null and void in Honduras. No matter, Mr. Schoenwetter was sentenced to over eight years in federal prison. He served most of his sentence and is now on supervised release.

How does one measure what was lost in this and other cases of wasteful criminalization and prosecution: Mr. Schoenwetter’s liberty and livelihood? The irretrievably missed economic activity and tax revenue from his work? The costs of law enforcement, lawyers, and court administration? Several years housing Mr. Schoenwetter in our prison system?

The world recently read about Mr. Schoenwetter’s case in a late July cover story from The Economist magazine, “Rough Justice: America Locks Up Too Many People, Some For Acts That Should Not Even Be Criminal.” On Tuesday, Congress will hear directly from Mr. Schoenwetter at a House hearing on “Reining in Overcriminalization,” sponsored by the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.

As President of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), I too will testify at this hearing, and share with Congress much accumulated data and research revealing how very far astray our “overcriminalization nation” has veered. Experts from numerous disciplines, vantage points and political backgrounds, including NACDL, have studied and reported on the abject failure of America’s across-the-board “tough on crime” approach over the last several decades.

Well, we know that in the year 1900, there were about 165 federal criminal laws on the books. By 1970, that number was 2,000. Today, there are over 4,450 federal crimes scattered throughout the United States Code, with estimates of as many as 300,000 federal regulations that can be punitively enforced. The problem is out-of-control and growing. Just this year, when Congress enacted financial reform legislation, it added more than two dozen new crimes.

For many, when it comes to regulation of social conduct, every problem is a nail, so all that’s needed is the hammer of criminalization. With every passing Congress, though, we are getting a better idea of exactly what this criminal justice structure looks like, and it is not pretty, it is not cheap, and it is surely not rooted in the American values of fairness, justice, and checked government power.

A few months ago, the Heritage Foundation and NACDL released a groundbreaking, non-partisan, joint report and set of recommendations on an important part of this problem, Without Intent: How Congress Is Eroding the Criminal Intent Requirement in Federal Law. At the report’s release, former Attorney General Edwin Meese III highlighted the absurdity of the expression “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” given the current volume of the federal criminal law. He’s right.

Overcriminalization and wasteful prosecution have led the United States to have both the highest absolute number of people in prison – approximately 2.3 million – as well as the highest rate of incarceration– roughly one in 100, when just counting adults – of any nation on earth. And even as the world’s incarceration leader, the U.S. can make no claim to be anywhere near the safest society in the world.

Exactly what is served by taking away so much of Mr. Schoenwetter’s life? Our constitution cannot afford the police and regulatory state we have become. And the American people simply cannot afford its tragic human cost or economic price tag. Bipartisan efforts to fix what’s broken here will be good for fairness and justice, good for the economy, and good for people’s confidence in government as a problem-solver.

Jim E. Lavine is the President of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Crikey! Those undersized Honduran lobsters really pack a wallop!

Quote:The world recently read about Mr. Schoenwetter’s case in a late July cover story from The Economist magazine, “Rough Justice: America Locks Up Too Many People, Some For Acts That Should Not Even Be Criminal.”

Link: Rough justice: America locks up too many people, some for acts that should not even be criminal

Also: Rough justice in America: Too many laws, too many prisoners

Quote:THREE pickup trucks pulled up outside George Norris’s home in Spring, Texas. Six armed police in flak jackets jumped out. Thinking they must have come to the wrong place, Mr Norris opened his front door, and was startled to be shoved against a wall and frisked for weapons. He was forced into a chair for four hours while officers ransacked his house. They pulled out drawers, rifled through papers, dumped things on the floor and eventually loaded 37 boxes of Mr Norris’s possessions onto their pickups. They refused to tell him what he had done wrong. “It wasn’t fun, I can tell you that,” he recalls.

Mr Norris was 65 years old at the time, and a collector of orchids. He eventually discovered that he was suspected of smuggling the flowers into America, an offence under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. This came as a shock. He did indeed import flowers and sell them to other orchid-lovers. And it was true that his suppliers in Latin America were sometimes sloppy about their paperwork. In a shipment of many similar-looking plants, it was rare for each permit to match each orchid precisely.

In March 2004, five months after the raid, Mr Norris was indicted, handcuffed and thrown into a cell with a suspected murderer and two suspected drug-dealers. When told why he was there, “they thought it hilarious.” One asked: “What do you do with these things? Smoke ’em?”

Prosecutors described Mr Norris as the “kingpin” of an international smuggling ring. He was dumbfounded: his annual profits were never more than about $20,000. When prosecutors suggested that he should inform on other smugglers in return for a lighter sentence, he refused, insisting he knew nothing beyond hearsay.

He pleaded innocent. But an undercover federal agent had ordered some orchids from him, a few of which arrived without the correct papers. For this, he was charged with making a false statement to a government official, a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Since he had communicated with his suppliers, he was charged with conspiracy, which also carries a potential five-year term.

As his legal bills exploded, Mr Norris reluctantly changed his plea to guilty, though he still protests his innocence. He was sentenced to 17 months in prison. After some time, he was released while his appeal was heard, but then put back inside. His health suffered: he has Parkinson’s disease, which was not helped by the strain of imprisonment. For bringing some prescription sleeping pills into prison, he was put in solitary confinement for 71 days. The prison was so crowded, however, that even in solitary he had two room-mates. ...

Quote:Jim Felman, a defence lawyer in Tampa, Florida, says America is conducting “an experiment in imprisoning first-time non-violent offenders for periods of time previously reserved only for those who had killed someone”. One of Mr Felman’s clients, a fraudster called Sholam Weiss, was sentenced to 845 years. “I got it reduced to 835,” sighs Mr Felman. Faced with such penalties, he says, the incentive to co-operate, which means to say things that are helpful to the prosecution, is overwhelming. And this, he believes, “warps the truth-seeking function” of justice.

Innocent defendants may plead guilty in return for a shorter sentence to avoid the risk of a much longer one. A prosecutor can credibly threaten a middle-aged man that he will die in a cell unless he gives evidence against his boss. This is unfair, complains Harvey Silverglate, the author of “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent”. If a defence lawyer offers a witness money to testify that his client is innocent, that is bribery. But a prosecutor can legally offer something of far greater value—his freedom—to a witness who says the opposite. The potential for wrongful convictions is obvious.  ...

The US Justice System is insane.

You might want to check out this information here...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_care_se...e_hysteria

Clinton's Attoney General, Janet Reno actually built her career on railroading innocent people.