Overcriminalization

Although there are times when moral issues come up in criminal law, such as in cases of rape, murder and other violent crimes, on the whole, strictly moral crimes should not fall within the jurisdiction of criminal justice (Beale, 2005, 748). These acts should be strictly between consenting individuals, and when they are, should be beyond the purvey of the law. The French Constitution, after which the American Constitution was modeled, placed constraints on criminal law such that people were to have, "the power of doing whatever does not injure another," free of criminal penalties: unfortunately this was not included in the United States Constitution (Richards, 1

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isconsin carried a maximum penalty of two years jail time and a $10,000 fine. The Wisconsin woman was the first woman prosecuted for this "crime" since 1888. This charge was brought at the request of the woman's husband, showing that these crimes can be used on a whim by prosecutors (759). Recently, the Air force charged the first woman ever to pilot a B52, Kelly Flinn, and a Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, Captain James Yee, with adultery (Beale, 2005, 757). Again, the charges were used in Yee's case, as in the case of the Wisconsin woman, at the prosecutors discretion, this time to make up for not being able to make the original charge stick. He was charged with adultery, possessing pornography, and mishandling documents because the prosecutor could not prove the original charges of espionage and sedition, which carry the death penalty. Using these rarely used and ancient statutes is clearly overcriminalization. Judges and prosecutors are using their discretionary powers to select out certain people for prosecution while others do exactly the same thing every day and never get prosecuted. How can this be justice? The two military examples given of people prosecuted for adultery were not doing anything that thous
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1449
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)