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It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the average busy professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, takes care of personal and family obligations, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have become not only exceedingly numerous and broad, but also impossibly vague. As the Morissette scenario indicated, federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and its insistence on fair notice, so prosecutors can find some arguable federal crime to apply to just about any one of us, even for the most seemingly innocuous conduct (and since the mid-1980s have done so increasingly).

    The above passage, an excerpt from the introductory chapter of Three Felonies a Day, summarizes the root of the problems Silverglate sees with current federal criminal law. These dangerous trends accelerated in the 1980s, as Silverglate indicates throughout the book. This, to be sure, is not an arbitrary date. As a longtime legal practitioner and commentator, Silverglate both chronicled the pernicious developments in the federal prosecutorial system and witnessed firsthand how these changes impacted individuals.

    Silverglate has been a practicing trial lawyer, as well as a civil liberties and criminal law columnist, since the late 1960s. Throughout his four-decades (and counting) with the Boston Phoenix, Silverglate has written dozens of pieces on criminal justice issues, including shocking developments with federal drug warriors (“Imperial Justice”); FBI corruption (“What’s truly corrupt about the FBI”); and the need for a “Clean Sweep” of the (first) Bush Administration’s Justice Department in 1993, to name a few. In his capacity as a bi-monthly civil liberties columnist for The National Law Journal, Silverglate also examined legal trends related to Three Felonies a Day: an appeals circuit decision (later overturned) that outlawed prosecutors from conferring benefits for witness testimony, as well as an overzealous prosecution of a so-called spy, among others. (A more complete list is below).

    What distinguishes Silverglate from other legal scholars and commentators is his work in the field. Not only has he examined legal trends as a writer; he has experienced their real-life impact to individual liberty as a criminal defense attorney with a wide-ranging clientele. (For more, see About the Author.) From this perspective came Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.

 

A Sampling of Harvey's previous articles related to Three Felonies A Day
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