The Tyranny of Good Intentions

How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice             Back to NCPA Debate Home Page

The Death of Due Process [Follow the link at the bottom to the full text of the article on www.forbes.com. This review of Paul Craig Robert's new book examines the expansion of criminal law and prosecutorial discretion on how to interpret new laws and regulations. The blame is placed on expanded "wars" on crime and drugs. Proposed new privacy laws and regulations will contribute to abuses of state power. Of particular concern are the medical privacy edicts the Clinton Administration intends to issue in the coming weeks. --Greg Rehmke] ----- The Death of Due Process How would you like to live in a country with criminal laws so broad that everyone is guilty of some crime and it's only prosecutorial whim that sends certain unpopular citizens off to jail? You live in just such a country. By Peter Brimelow, Forbes Magazine, 12.11.00 "THE LEFT IS RIGHT: AMERICA IS AN UNJUST SOCIETY." Startling words to come from Paul Craig Roberts, 61, an architect (as assistant secretary of the Treasury) of the Reagan tax-cut revolution and now a syndicated columnist and chairman of the Institute for Political Economy. But he's not talking about discrimination or the unequal distribution of wealth. The problem, he says, is this: "Americans are no longer secure in law-the justice system no longer seeks truth and prosecutors are untroubled by wrongful convictions." Recently, with coauthor Lawrence M. Stratton, a lawyer, Roberts published The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice (Forum, $25). In it he blames the Reagan and Bush administrations' wars on crime and drugs for institutionalizing many of the problems he sees developing. In particular he blames the near-sextupling of assistant U.S. attorneys in the early 1980s for a fatal dilution in prosecutorial standards. The prosecutions are not making the country safer for the law-abiding. They are making it more dangerous. Historically, Roberts argues, Americans enjoyed the protection of what were termed "the Rights of Englishmen" by 18th-century jurist Sir William Blackstone, whose Commentaries on the Laws of England was a bestseller in the 13 colonies. The broadest of these was the right to due process. That meant punishment by dint of laws and evidence rather than, as has been the case in much of human history and is still the case in much of the world, by dint of a dictator's fiat. A related notion is that there should be no bills of attainder, legislation designed to criminalize a specific individual. ... This erosion of Americans' historic protections has already caused some public scandal. The spectacle of innocents losing homes, boats and other property because tenants, customers and even passersby were using drugs caused House Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde to introduce legislation this year attempting to rein in forfeiture. .... ---- Click here for full articles at www.forbes.com.