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This is famously how Al Capone was taken down, since they couldn't pin anything else on him.
by cecilpl2 5y ago
This is famously how Al Capone was taken down, since they couldn't pin anything else on him.
- jeremyjh 5y agoI’m sure local police and prosecutors could have gotten him for murder etc. but he had them all on salary.
- jd115 5y ago
- Dma54rhs 5y agoThis is not reddit, please stop...
- mschuster91 5y agoFor the (ultra-)rich and well-connected, the wheels of justice tend to turn slower than for ordinary people, mostly because rich people have the resources to hire enough lawyers to swamp courts with all kinds of bullshit petitions and impediments, to submit expert "interpretations" or to argue about formalities. Not to mention that a lot of what surrounds the Trump presidency is unchartered territory in a legal sense - there exist laws, but they have never had to be tested before.
- DarylZero 5y agoWas there no federal murder statute at the time?
- xyzzyz 5y agoFeds cannot prosecute someone for murder if it’s not under federal jurisdiction. It would have to be murder of federal officer, or on tribal lands, or something like that.
- DarylZero 5y agoUh I don't think that's true? They just don't do it by policy usually. Remember those federal CA prosecutions for (state-legal) medical marijuana? And the federal prosecution of the police who assaulted Rodney King _after_ their state level acquittal?
- arcticbull 5y agoTo my knowledge, that's possible because the Feds have jurisdiction over inter-state commerce. If they can connect the crime to any kind of cross-state-lines activity they can claim the jurisdiction.
- bcrosby95 5y agoHas there been any case where the commerce clause has let the federal government down? It's a hole large enough to drive a country through.
- nradov 5y agoYes that is unfortunate. It appears that President Roosevelt forced the current expansive interpretation of the Commerce Clause by threatening to pack the Supreme Court with political cronies if the justices ruled against his New Deal legislation. Hopefully some day the Supreme Court will have the courage to overturn those precedents and limit federal government power to what the Constitution's authors originally intended.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> It appears that President Roosevelt forced the current expansive interpretation of the Commerce Clause by threatening to pack the Supreme Court with political cronies if the justices ruled against his New Deal legislation. Based on what? The expansive interpretation is usually traced to Wickard v. Filburn (1942), the court packing scheme was introduced and ultimately fizzled in 1937; the one case while it was an active issue that is sometimes credited to the threat of the court packing scheme was one weighing state police powers (in setting a minimum wage) against the Constitutional guarantee against states restricting freedom to contract, which didn't involve the Commerce Clause at all. (And even that case the decisive shift in position appears to have actually occurred before the court packing threat, in any case.)
- bluGill 5y agoWhich is easy to do when the locals don't support the law. Al Capone mostly opporated in areas with a large beer culture.