Stupid judges strike again

JHS
Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:34:40 +0000

Accidental vs. intentional isn’t the issue. The statute makes that distinction, and requires intent (as almost every statute defining a crime does), and no one would argue that the conduct here wasn’t intentional. But the little boys under the school staircase are behaving intentionally, too. What they are doing WOULD be a crime if they did it in the girls’ restroom or locker room.

You want the statute to make it a crime to photograph anything a person reasonably expects to keep private, no matter where she is. That would pretty much be the standard for the tort of invasion of privacy. But whoever drafted this statute used formulations that clearly have a different legal meaning.

And while you are right that judges sometimes interpret laws broadly when it serves their ideological purposes, that rarely, if ever, happens with the definition of crimes. Our common law tradition in fact makes that the norm for civil offenses, and many civil statutes are deliberately written in a broad, vague manner to give judges a lot of leeway to decide what conduct is prohibited and what isn’t. (The Sherman Act, which is the basis of most of our antitrust law, says approximately nothing specific.) But one of the important differences between conservatism and facism is a reluctance to send people to prison merely because you are a judge and you don’t like what they did.