Greenwald: Hastert is a victim of over-criminalization [View all]

[Cali_Democrat]

DENNY HASTERT IS CONTEMPTIBLE, BUT HIS INDICTMENT EXEMPLIFIES AMERICA’S OVER-CRIMINALIZATION PATHOLOGY
BY GLENN GREENWALD

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Hastert was indicted for two alleged felonies: 1) withdrawing cash from his bank accounts in amounts and patterns designed to hide the payments; and 2) lying to the FBI about the purpose of those withdrawals once they detected them and then inquired with him. That’s it. For those venial acts, he faces five years in a federal prison on each count.

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Over-criminalization breeds injustice and abuse of power. As the New York Times’s Adam Liptak reported in a great 2008 article on the uniquely oppressive U.S. penal state: “people who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences.” Moreover, “Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.”

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In the indictment, the DOJ made the decision not to expressly specify the “past misconduct” Hastert sought to conceal. Nonetheless, federal law enforcement officials apparently spent the day running around leaking to media outlets what the indictment worked hard to insinuate: that “Hastert paid a man to conceal sexual misconduct while the man was a student at the high school where Hastert taught.” So this seems to be a case where federal prosecutors wanted to punish someone for a crime they couldn’t prove he committed, so instead reached into their bottomless bag of offenses to turn him into a criminal for something else.

The whole piece:

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/29/denny-hastert-highly-unsympathetic-face-americas-criminalization-pathology/