Laws Are Made To Be Broken

Katherine Mangu-Ward | October 15, 2007

What bored prosecutors do for fun:

Junior and senior prosecutors would sit around, and someone would name a random celebrity—say, Mother Theresa or John Lennon.

It would then be up to the junior prosecutors to figure out a plausible crime for which to indict him or her. The crimes were not usually rape, murder, or other crimes you'd see on Law & Order but rather the incredibly broad yet obscure crimes that populate the U.S. Code like a kind of jurisprudential minefield: Crimes like "false statements" (a felony, up to five years), "obstructing the mails" (five years), or "false pretenses on the high seas" (also five years). The trick and the skill lay in finding the more obscure offenses that fit the character of the celebrity and carried the toughest sentences. The, result, however, was inevitable: "prison time."

Slate has a feature up on laws that are nearly always broken. So far: "Drug legalization" may not be going well on some fronts, but consider the wide availability pf psychoactive substances these days. And porn across state lines is A-OK with Uncle Sam.