6 ms·

This is counter thousands of years of legal tradition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignorantia_juris_non_excusat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignorantia_juri

by froh 6y ago

This is counter thousands of years of legal tradition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignorantia_juris_non_excusat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignorantia_juris_non_excusat: > Ignorantia juris non excusat (Legal principle) > Ignorantia juris non excusat or ignorantia legis neminem excusat (Latin for "ignorance of the law excuses not" and "ignorance of law excuses no one" respectively) is a legal principle holding that a person who is unaware of a law may not escape liability for violating that law merely by being unaware of its content. > European-law countries with a tradition of Roman law may also use an expression from Aristotle translated into Latin: nemo censetur ignorare legem (nobody is thought to be ignorant of the law) or ignorantia iuris nocet (not knowing the law is harmful). And if Wikipedia is no authority for you maybe the bible is: Leviticus 5:17: "If a person sins and does what is forbidden in any of the LORD's commands, even though he does not know it, he is guilty and will be held responsible."

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
No. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" is what you say to the defendant who claims they can't be prosecuted because they didn't know. This is about, in essence, prosecutorial discretion. If everybody was prosecuted for breaking all the laws they didn't know existed, everybody would be in prison. Also, the old principle was reasonable when the law consisted of things like "don't kill people or steal stuff" which everybody can be reasonably expected to know whether or not they ever read the book where it's written down. That doesn't quite work when you're talking about every obscure detail of the 70,000 pages in the Federal Register.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Really? Because the bible has all sorts of weird rules in it that seem kind of arbitrary and certainly not self-obvious. The principle is reasonable because otherwise everyone would just claim they didn't know regardless of if they did
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > Really? Because the bible has all sorts of weird rules in it that seem kind of arbitrary and certainly not self-obvious. Nobody said it was perfect, as they say. > The principle is reasonable because otherwise everyone would just claim they didn't know regardless of if they did https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25830167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25830167
    - bawolff 6y ago
      > Nobody said it was perfect, as they say Not saying it is perfect or imperfect. Just saying the imagined time when all rules were self-obvious natural laws that could be logically deduced a priori, never existed.
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        The laws that were both actually enforced and reasonable basically were. I don't think we need to emulate things people historically said they would do even though they didn't, or did do but were unreasonable.
        bawolff 6y ago
        That seems circular to me. Surely most people follow the laws that seem reasonable to them. If everyone agreed on what was reasonable behaviour, we wouldn't need laws.
        AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        Basically everybody knows that murder is wrong but some people still do it.
        bawolff 6y ago
        People do try and argue its justified in specific circumstances. Sometimes people have an over-active imagination for what constitutes self-defense. Hell, trump pardoned someone convicted of murder (which is disgusting, but i guess he thought it was reasonable). But my main point is there was never a time or society where the only crime was murder.
- volak 6y ago
  Some juicy federal crimes we're all expected to know from @CrimeADay on Twitter 26 USC §5674(b) & 27 CFR §25.144(a) make it a federal crime for a brewer to remove beer from a brewery in a keg that has the name of more than one brewer on it. 21 USC §§331, 333 & 21 CFR §169.115(a) make it a federal crime to sell French dressing if less than 35% of its weight is vegetable oil. 43 USC §1733 & 43 CFR §6302.20(e) make it a federal crime to pick someone up from a federal wilderness area using a hot air balloon. 7 USC §8303, §8313 & 9 CFR §93.318(b) make it a federal crime to bring an American horse back into the United States after being in a Canadian rodeo without a health certificate. 42 USC §6928 & 40 CFR §257.3–8(b) make it a federal crime to start a dangerous garbage fire. 21 USC §331, 333, 343 & 21 CFR §155.201(a)(2)(v) make it a federal crime to sell canned "random sliced" mushrooms unless they were sliced in a random manner.
  - tony101 6y ago
    "Have you ever clogged a toilet in a national forest? That could get you six months in federal prison. Written a letter to a pirate? You might be looking at three years in the slammer. Leaving the country with too many nickels, drinking a beer on a bicycle in a national park, or importing a pregnant polar bear are all very real crimes, and this riotously funny, ridiculously entertaining, and fully illustrated book shows how just about anyone can become—or may already be—a federal criminal." https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Federal-Criminal-Illustrated/dp/1982112514 https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Federal-Criminal-Illustrat...
  - xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
    There are some stupid laws on the books, but you have picked awful examples. Only one of those laws is something a non-specialist would ever encounter, and that one is common sense. Everyone should know that burning garbage can be dangerous. Anyone who operates a hot air balloon should know how to use it safely. Anyone who works with animals should know about the risks of spreading disease. Anyone who works with food should know about food labelling laws.
  - tzs 6y ago
    > Some juicy federal crimes we're all expected to know No, we are not all expected to know them. The first one is from a part of the tax code that covers taxation on alcohol sales. If you are not involved in the commercial beer brewing industry, you do not need to know it. The second one is part of the rules on interstate commerce in food, drugs, and cosmetics. Again, most of us have no need to know it. Same with the sixth one. The third is from the laws governing public lands. If you aren't going to fly your hot air balloon into a Federal wilderness area, there is no need to know it. ...and so on.
- froh 6y ago
  So what the presidential order says is it's at the discretion of the prosecution if they press or drop charges, and the don't have an obligation any more to prosecute federal crimes? How is the "we, the people" represented in this discrimination? How is it supervised and controlled and "corrected" if the wrong crimes are not prosecuted?
  - tony101 6y ago
    Prosecutorial discretion is already the law of the land. Prosecutors don't have the resources to prosecute every crime. They also do not have the obligation to prosecute every crime. https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-procedure/what-is-prosecutorial-discretion-.html https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-procedure/what-is-pros... https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/prosecutorial-discretion-leeway-prosecutors-decisions-criminal-charges.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/prosecutorial-discre...
bpodgursky 6y ago
Well, I'll counter that "Mens rea" is a legal traditional just as old, because lawmakers even thousands of years ago understood the injustice of punishing people for actions they could not reasonably know were crimes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea
- peteretep 6y ago
  Exactly, as mentioned by the order itself, which also takes in strict liability crimes and sets a posture that they should be as limited as possible.
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  Mens rea doesn't require that you know that the thing you are doing is illegal. It only requires that you know you are doing the thing.
  - tony101 6y ago
    Depends on how the law is written. Some (but not all) statutes require prosecution to show that defendant knew it was illegal.
tony101 6y ago
This does not work when even the government cannot count the number of crimes (and criminal laws), and when Governors accidentally and unknowingly admit to committing crimes: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304319804576389601079728920 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304319804576389... https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/473659-america-has-too-many-criminal-laws https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/473659-america-... https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2013/03/frequent-reference-question-how-many-federal-laws-are-there/ https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2013/03/frequent-reference-questio... https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Federal-Criminal-Illustrated/dp/1982112514 https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Federal-Criminal-Illustrat... https://twitter.com/CrimeADay https://twitter.com/CrimeADay https://abcnews.go.com/US/york-gov-cuomo-ruffles-feathers-revealing-illegal-eagle/story?id=57149539 https://abcnews.go.com/US/york-gov-cuomo-ruffles-feathers-re...
Sylamore 6y ago
Agents of the state get Qualified Immunity even when they knowingly violate the law, but citizen/subjects get the full book thrown at them for laws they weren't even aware existed. Seems totally balanced to me.
wbl 6y ago
The defenses available to a defendant have nothing to do with prudent lawmaking. This order simply advises regulators to not make criminal law without careful consideration of the harms of doing so.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ashtonkem 6y ago
Ignorance of the law is a valid excuse ... for the kinds of laws that Congress can see themselves breaking. All kinds of laws have a "willfulness" requirement, which means that you had to do something on purpose. For things like vehicular manslaughter or public indecency, this means that you had to purposefully do something bad with your vehicle or expose yourself. Tragic vehicular and wardrobe malfunctions do not meet the willfulness requirement. But the issue happens when you apply this standard to white collar crimes, because this makes knowledge of the law a legal requirement to being convicted of it. For example, let's consider the IRS own handbook[0] on tax crimes. This book explicitly includes wilfulness as an element for tax evasion on page 15. It defines wilfullness on page 17 as: > Willfulness is defined as the "voluntary, intentional violation of a known legal duty." It also helpfully notes (also on page 17) > Willfulness is subjectively measured. A defendant's good faith belief that he is not violating the tax laws, no matter how objectively unreasonable that belief may be, is a defense in a tax prosecution. So yes, if you're avoiding paying your taxes, ignorance of the law is a valid defense, and in fact the IRS agrees. This also applies to bank fraud, election rule fraud, etc. etc. 0 - https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/tax_crimes_handbook.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/tax_crimes_handbook.pdf
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  Willfulness is a completely different thing that knowing the law. Willfulness only requires that I intend to do what I did, not that I knew it was illegal. If I somehow don't know that killing people is illegal and I intentionally shoot someone, the excuse that I didn't know it was illegal doesn't get me anywhere (even assuming the court believes me). If, on the other hand, I didn't intend to kill someone, that does lessen the severity of the crime or even eliminate it if it was truly a freak accident where I couldn't reasonably have prevented it by exercising more caution.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Right, but the IRS themselves say that a genuine but misguided belief that what you’re doing is legal is a valid defense against the charge of tax evasion. The result is that ignorance is a defense, at least for some types of laws.
pyuser583 6y ago
No ... this had never been an absolute rule. It’s generally true. It it’s not some absolute or time honored principle of justice. There are plenty of courts, including American ones, that treat extremely counterintuitive laws different.

by froh 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

No. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" is what you say to the defendant who claims they can't be prosecuted because they didn't know. This is about, in essence, prosecutorial discretion. If everybody was prosecuted for breaking all the laws they didn't know existed, everybody would be in prison. Also, the old principle was reasonable when the law consisted of things like "don't kill people or steal stuff" which everybody can be reasonably expected to know whether or not they ever read the book where it's written down. That doesn't quite work when you're talking about every obscure detail of the 70,000 pages in the Federal Register.

bawolff 6y ago
Really? Because the bible has all sorts of weird rules in it that seem kind of arbitrary and certainly not self-obvious. The principle is reasonable because otherwise everyone would just claim they didn't know regardless of if they did
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > Really? Because the bible has all sorts of weird rules in it that seem kind of arbitrary and certainly not self-obvious. Nobody said it was perfect, as they say. > The principle is reasonable because otherwise everyone would just claim they didn't know regardless of if they did https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25830167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25830167
  - bawolff 6y ago
    > Nobody said it was perfect, as they say Not saying it is perfect or imperfect. Just saying the imagined time when all rules were self-obvious natural laws that could be logically deduced a priori, never existed.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      The laws that were both actually enforced and reasonable basically were. I don't think we need to emulate things people historically said they would do even though they didn't, or did do but were unreasonable.
      - bawolff 6y ago
        That seems circular to me. Surely most people follow the laws that seem reasonable to them. If everyone agreed on what was reasonable behaviour, we wouldn't need laws.
        AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        Basically everybody knows that murder is wrong but some people still do it.
        bawolff 6y ago
        People do try and argue its justified in specific circumstances. Sometimes people have an over-active imagination for what constitutes self-defense. Hell, trump pardoned someone convicted of murder (which is disgusting, but i guess he thought it was reasonable). But my main point is there was never a time or society where the only crime was murder.
volak 6y ago
Some juicy federal crimes we're all expected to know from @CrimeADay on Twitter 26 USC §5674(b) & 27 CFR §25.144(a) make it a federal crime for a brewer to remove beer from a brewery in a keg that has the name of more than one brewer on it. 21 USC §§331, 333 & 21 CFR §169.115(a) make it a federal crime to sell French dressing if less than 35% of its weight is vegetable oil. 43 USC §1733 & 43 CFR §6302.20(e) make it a federal crime to pick someone up from a federal wilderness area using a hot air balloon. 7 USC §8303, §8313 & 9 CFR §93.318(b) make it a federal crime to bring an American horse back into the United States after being in a Canadian rodeo without a health certificate. 42 USC §6928 & 40 CFR §257.3–8(b) make it a federal crime to start a dangerous garbage fire. 21 USC §331, 333, 343 & 21 CFR §155.201(a)(2)(v) make it a federal crime to sell canned "random sliced" mushrooms unless they were sliced in a random manner.
- tony101 6y ago
  "Have you ever clogged a toilet in a national forest? That could get you six months in federal prison. Written a letter to a pirate? You might be looking at three years in the slammer. Leaving the country with too many nickels, drinking a beer on a bicycle in a national park, or importing a pregnant polar bear are all very real crimes, and this riotously funny, ridiculously entertaining, and fully illustrated book shows how just about anyone can become—or may already be—a federal criminal." https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Federal-Criminal-Illustrated/dp/1982112514 https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Federal-Criminal-Illustrat...
- xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
  There are some stupid laws on the books, but you have picked awful examples. Only one of those laws is something a non-specialist would ever encounter, and that one is common sense. Everyone should know that burning garbage can be dangerous. Anyone who operates a hot air balloon should know how to use it safely. Anyone who works with animals should know about the risks of spreading disease. Anyone who works with food should know about food labelling laws.
- tzs 6y ago
  > Some juicy federal crimes we're all expected to know No, we are not all expected to know them. The first one is from a part of the tax code that covers taxation on alcohol sales. If you are not involved in the commercial beer brewing industry, you do not need to know it. The second one is part of the rules on interstate commerce in food, drugs, and cosmetics. Again, most of us have no need to know it. Same with the sixth one. The third is from the laws governing public lands. If you aren't going to fly your hot air balloon into a Federal wilderness area, there is no need to know it. ...and so on.
froh 6y ago
So what the presidential order says is it's at the discretion of the prosecution if they press or drop charges, and the don't have an obligation any more to prosecute federal crimes? How is the "we, the people" represented in this discrimination? How is it supervised and controlled and "corrected" if the wrong crimes are not prosecuted?
- tony101 6y ago
  Prosecutorial discretion is already the law of the land. Prosecutors don't have the resources to prosecute every crime. They also do not have the obligation to prosecute every crime. https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-procedure/what-is-prosecutorial-discretion-.html https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-procedure/what-is-pros... https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/prosecutorial-discretion-leeway-prosecutors-decisions-criminal-charges.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/prosecutorial-discre...

bpodgursky 6y ago

Well, I'll counter that "Mens rea" is a legal traditional just as old, because lawmakers even thousands of years ago understood the injustice of punishing people for actions they could not reasonably know were crimes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea

peteretep 6y ago
Exactly, as mentioned by the order itself, which also takes in strict liability crimes and sets a posture that they should be as limited as possible.
TheCoelacanth 6y ago
Mens rea doesn't require that you know that the thing you are doing is illegal. It only requires that you know you are doing the thing.
- tony101 6y ago
  Depends on how the law is written. Some (but not all) statutes require prosecution to show that defendant knew it was illegal.

tony101 6y ago

This does not work when even the government cannot count the number of crimes (and criminal laws), and when Governors accidentally and unknowingly admit to committing crimes: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304319804576389601079728920 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304319804576389... https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/473659-america-has-too-many-criminal-laws https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/473659-america-... https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2013/03/frequent-reference-question-how-many-federal-laws-are-there/ https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2013/03/frequent-reference-questio... https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Federal-Criminal-Illustrated/dp/1982112514 https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Federal-Criminal-Illustrat... https://twitter.com/CrimeADay https://twitter.com/CrimeADay https://abcnews.go.com/US/york-gov-cuomo-ruffles-feathers-revealing-illegal-eagle/story?id=57149539 https://abcnews.go.com/US/york-gov-cuomo-ruffles-feathers-re...

Sylamore 6y ago

Agents of the state get Qualified Immunity even when they knowingly violate the law, but citizen/subjects get the full book thrown at them for laws they weren't even aware existed. Seems totally balanced to me.

wbl 6y ago

The defenses available to a defendant have nothing to do with prudent lawmaking. This order simply advises regulators to not make criminal law without careful consideration of the harms of doing so.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ashtonkem 6y ago

Ignorance of the law is a valid excuse ... for the kinds of laws that Congress can see themselves breaking. All kinds of laws have a "willfulness" requirement, which means that you had to do something on purpose. For things like vehicular manslaughter or public indecency, this means that you had to purposefully do something bad with your vehicle or expose yourself. Tragic vehicular and wardrobe malfunctions do not meet the willfulness requirement. But the issue happens when you apply this standard to white collar crimes, because this makes knowledge of the law a legal requirement to being convicted of it. For example, let's consider the IRS own handbook[0] on tax crimes. This book explicitly includes wilfulness as an element for tax evasion on page 15. It defines wilfullness on page 17 as: > Willfulness is defined as the "voluntary, intentional violation of a known legal duty." It also helpfully notes (also on page 17) > Willfulness is subjectively measured. A defendant's good faith belief that he is not violating the tax laws, no matter how objectively unreasonable that belief may be, is a defense in a tax prosecution. So yes, if you're avoiding paying your taxes, ignorance of the law is a valid defense, and in fact the IRS agrees. This also applies to bank fraud, election rule fraud, etc. etc. 0 - https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/tax_crimes_handbook.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/tax_crimes_handbook.pdf

TheCoelacanth 6y ago
Willfulness is a completely different thing that knowing the law. Willfulness only requires that I intend to do what I did, not that I knew it was illegal. If I somehow don't know that killing people is illegal and I intentionally shoot someone, the excuse that I didn't know it was illegal doesn't get me anywhere (even assuming the court believes me). If, on the other hand, I didn't intend to kill someone, that does lessen the severity of the crime or even eliminate it if it was truly a freak accident where I couldn't reasonably have prevented it by exercising more caution.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Right, but the IRS themselves say that a genuine but misguided belief that what you’re doing is legal is a valid defense against the charge of tax evasion. The result is that ignorance is a defense, at least for some types of laws.

pyuser583 6y ago

No ... this had never been an absolute rule. It’s generally true. It it’s not some absolute or time honored principle of justice. There are plenty of courts, including American ones, that treat extremely counterintuitive laws different.