This Twitter feed shouldn’t exist.
This feed posts one federal criminal provision every day and has since July 2014. That’s almost six years of crimes: more than 2,000 ways to become a federal criminal in America.
Some sound silly. Some are ridiculously vague and poorly written. And for the topical ones—well, there probably shouldn’t be a federal criminal law for every single occasion.
But no matter how silly, or seemingly innocuous, they are all opportunities to become a crime suspect.
And it’s not exclusively a federal problem. Far from it. The overwhelming majority of criminal prosecutions are for state crimes. And those crimes suffer from the same problems.
Were you loitering? Breaching the peace? Being disorderly? Perhaps you won’t really know until you’ve been arrested, tried, appealed and the Supreme Court tells you.
There is no: “just don’t break the law.” Your government doesn’t know how much law there is. And if there are thousands of crimes, there’s endless probable cause.
So my challenge to lawmakers is to make it impossible for me to keep doing this feed.
