Criminal Statutes Flashcards
Principle of Legality
General Principle: A person may not be convicted and punished unless their conduct was previously defined as criminal. There can be no crime without (pre-existent) law, no punishment without (pre-existent) law. There is a prohibition on retroactive criminal law making.
(1) Three Corollaries to the Principle
(a) First, criminal statutes should be understandable to ordinary
law abiding persons
(b) Second, criminal statutes should be crafted so that they do
not delegate basic policy matters to policemen, judges, and
juries for resolution on an ad hoc and subjective basis.
(c) Third, judicial interpretation of ambiguous statutes should
be biased in favor of the accused, a concept today known as
lenity doctrine
The Requirement of Previously Defined Conduct
(1) The crimes must be legislatively defined by the legislature in the statute.
(2) Ex Post Facto Legislation and Due Process
(a) The principle of legality not only is a common law
doctrine, but has deep constitutional roots. The Ex Post Facto Clause of the Constitution prohibits retroactive application of new criminal legislation and legislative expansion of existing statutes. Legislatures are prohibited from enacting laws that would punish conduct that was lawful at the time of its commission, or that increases the punishment for an act committed before the law took effect. In turn, courts are prohibited from enlarging the scope of criminal statutes by the Due Process Clause. Both constitutional provisions safeguard common interests, in particular the interests in fundamental fairness (though notice and fair warnings) and the prevention of arbitrary and vindictive use of laws.
Desuetude
(a) Deals with existing offenses and laws that are hardly ever enforced. They are said, by courts, to have lapsed, simply
because they lack public support.
(b) The rationale is that unenforced laws lack support in public convictions and they may not be brought to bear, in what will inevitably be an unpredictable and essentially arbitrary way, against private citizens.
Prohibition of Bills of Attainder
(a) A special legislation that declares a specific person to be guilty of a crime and subject to punishment without either a trial or conviction.
(b) This is where the legislature does not like what an individual did, therefore they create law to punish that specific person.
(1) Statutory Clarity
) To determine how much clarity is required, courts generally look at three factors
(i) The purpose of the statute (i.e. the societal interest at stake by the legislation)
(ii) The extent to which the statutory ambiguity was necessary to further legislative goal
1. The court will look at the legislative history and what the legislators intended for the statute to mean. To do that, they look at legislative debates and what was discussed.
(iii) The impact of the statute on the protected rights of the individual
1. Overbreadth
Fair Notice
(a) A corollary of the legality principle is that a person may not
be punished for an offense unless the statute is sufficiently clear that a person of ordinary intelligence can understand its meaning. Fundamental fairness of course requires that people be given notice of what to avoid. There is a boundary of prohibited conduct that individuals need to be aware of, so as not to overstep legality and face criminal liability. Such notice can result in them adjusting their conduct accordingly. There is Due Process implication
Void for Vagueness Doctrine
(a) It is vague if men of common intelligence must guess at its
interpretation differently
(i) Vague statutes provide insufficient notice to law abiding persons what the law is
Lenity Doctrine:
(a) Provides that if a statute can reasonably be interpreted favorably to the government and equally reasonably be interpreted favorably to the defendant, it should be read in the light more favorable to the defendant.
Overbreadth
(a) A statute is said to be overbroad if, in addition to
proscribing activities that are constitutionally protected, it also sweeps within its coverage activities that are protected by one or another constitutional right (usually found in the First Amendment)
(i) Tramples on the exercise of other constitutionally protected rights by prohibiting innocent conduct.
