The United States is supposed to be the land of the free. But in practice, the number of laws and rules which have to be adhered to call this claim into question. In 2014, Mike Chase, a white-collar criminal defence lawyer, set up the wildly successful @CrimeADay Twitter feed. It draws attention to the overwhelming volume of criminal laws on the books by highlighting some of the maddest ones. Imprisonable offences in the US include clogging a toilet in a national forest, writing a letter to a pirate, and using a falconer’s falcon to make a film that isn’t about falconry. The Twitter feed has now become an illustrated book, How To Become A Federal Criminal. spiked caught up with Chase to find out more about these strange laws and what they mean for liberty.
spiked: Which are your favourite unusual crimes?
Mike Chase: I love food crimes. I love that in the United States, you can’t sell ketchup that is too runny. And that is defined as ketchup that runs faster than 14cm within 30 seconds at 20 degrees celsius. The United States has embraced the metric system when it comes to putting people in prison.
Against the State: An ...
Best Price: $5.02
Buy New $5.52
(as of 11:35 UTC - Details)
I like animal crimes, too. It is not that I like to see animals get hurt, but these crimes are all based on really stupid and gross things that people have done to animals over the years. I like to think about people who tried to ride manatees or who tried to shoot a fish from an aeroplane. I have always been of the view that if you can shoot a fish from an aeroplane, you should be able to keep the fish. We shouldn’t arrest those people for a good shot. But the feds want to lock those people up.
spiked: Where do these crimes come from?
Chase: I think they come from three places. You have garden-variety crimes which we would all want to prohibit: murder, fraud, all that kind of stuff.
But then there are these laws that come from regulators – people who are not elected, people that you would never know if you walked by them on the street. They pass rules, and they don’t have to go through the legislature. They just pass rule after rule after rule. Congress will pass a broad law that says any violations of their regulations are a federal crime. And so without any action by the lawmakers, regulators end up effectively creating law. And so we end up with hundreds of thousands of things that are prohibited.
The final category is Congress making reactive laws. When somebody is afraid of some very bizarre thing happening, they lobby Congress to get a law passed. The flipside of that is old concerns that are no longer concerns. But because nobody ever goes through to clean up the books, we just have these old laws that hang around.
For instance, the United States used to be very concerned about pirates and piracy. And so we have a huge number of pirate crimes on the books. Certainly there is piracy that happens in other parts of the world, but we don’t have a lot of pirates anymore around the coasts of the United States, and there and very few pirate prosecutions.
