attorney general, take three. seriously, is this a joke? are we being punk'd?

[hth_the_first]

"Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime."

YES, IT IS, MUKASEY, YOU EVIL PIECE OF SHIT. THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT THE WORD "CRIME" MEANS.

Comments

[utterfrivolity]

Sure. One place this distinction has been a major issue is in immigration. While entering the country illegally is a federal crime, lacking legal status is a civil violation. This matters when local law enforcement officers decide that they want to start enforcing federal immigration law (which may very well be against the law in itself, but let's definitely not get into that *g*). Some law enforcement officers have used databases that include status-related offenses (e.g. overstaying a visa) as well as criminal offenses, which means that they may be detaining people based on the database without any evidence that they've actually committed a crime.

Administrative law presents a lot of these types of situations, where there's a violation of a regulation of some sort that isn't actually prohibited in criminal law and carries no criminal penalty.

Of course it's all muddled because you can use "law" to mean any number of things and "crime" to mean any number of things. But I would've said it the way Mukasey did without really thinking too hard about it. In his position he should've been thinking about what it'd sound like to non-lawyers, of course. I bet he will in the future.

[hth_the_first]

Fair enough, thanks! "Law" and "crime" are words that most of us use all the time and don't think of as unclear at all, but it's easy to forget that every profession has a specialist's vocabulary, too.

I bet he will in the future.

I would take that action. Not that I don't hope you're right, but I suspect you're wrong.