I’m a Criminal, You’re a Criminal
by Katherine Mangu-Ward
Reason.com
Harvey
Silverglate, a Boston-based criminal defense and civil liberties
attorney, is the co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in
Education, which fights speech codes on college campuses. He is also the
author, most recently, of Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the
Innocent (Encounter Books), a book about “how the United States
Department of Justice targets all segments of civil society by means of
abusive prosecutions based upon unacceptably vague federal criminal
statutes and regulations.”
Senior Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward spoke with Silverglate in November.
Q: When did you notice that people were committing crimes without knowing it?
A: Starting in the mid-1980s, I noticed in my federal criminal cases
that people who were being indicted would ask, “What the hell did I do
to get myself indicted?” We would read the indictment, and neither I nor
my law partners could figure out why the feds considered what this
person did to be a crime. We weren’t contesting that the client did what
he was charged with, but we couldn’t figure out when what he did had
become a federal crime.
This is the same period of time when I started keeping track of what I
later realized was a related phenomenon. In universities in the
mid-1980s, students were being charged under these incredibly vague
speech and harassment codes on campuses when the student was engaging in
what the student—and I—considered to be normal college-age behavior:
saying things that were provocative, sometimes kind of sharp, sometimes
insulting.
I can’t help but think that they’re related, that they have something
to do with a decreasing emphasis on language with real meaning, that
there is a kind of corruption of the English language that enables these
kinds of codes and federal statutes to wreak havoc in the lives of
people who would not normally be on notice that they’re doing something
that can get them thrown out of school or into federal prison.
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