Maxim
On May 17, 2013, Jonathan Rosenberg wrote an article for Maxim Magazine, which showed us the absurdity of our nation’s federal criminal regime: “The 7 Felonies You’ve Probably Committed in Your Lifetime…”
With over 3,500 federal statutes on the books, we’re all criminals if the prosecutor wants to see it that way; we’re all guilty of clicking on website terms of use without knowing what we’re agreeing to; we’re all guilty of accidentally opening the wrong envelope in our mailbox; we’re all guilty of overpaying or underpaying a dollar here or there, and not on purpose. But if a prosecutor wants to make it look criminal, they can do so — they can make any series of actions look like lies, crimes, and immoral behaviors. Merely putting someone on a grainy video in front of a jury makes them seem suspect; you tell a story about them, then that grainy figure comes to life as a wrongdoer; you then get a “witness” to say a few things about the grainy figure, and suddenly the USA versus Fill-In-Blank-Nameis now a soon-to-be convict; that defeated defense lawyer you were appointed has no energy to convince the federal jury — sitting with the defendant at the far back of the courtroom — that this conspiracy by the Government is all just a bunch of overblown lies in vindication of an overblown investigative effort to vindicate some supervisor’s moral view of the world.
Even Federal Judges can’t escape missteps under the Federal law: 131 Federal Judges Broke the Law, and Of Course They Were Not Prosecuted. I am personally very glad that they were not prosecuted; we should rejoice when such missteps are warned against, and not prosecuted. We should, however, hope that others — not federal judges — who break the rules are not so cruelly held to a standard of duty that we don’t hold our judges to on major conflicts violations.
We fight for our clients because we could all become the innocent accused; all it takes is one prosecutor, one liberal interpretation of the law — one interpretation of the tax code; one interpretation of a lending statute; one interpretation of trading securities while sitting on the bench. They may not come for You, but you, they may come for you. For us, and we are all each one of the other, but for the individual part of us that is God-given.