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Op-Ed

Crime and No Punishment

May 13, 2019

Criminal law in this country has changed radically. Just because you’ve committed a crime doesn’t mean you should be punished for it. This concept explains a lot about what’s been going on lately.

Milt Policzer

By Milt Policzer

Courthouse News columnist; racehorse owner and breeder; one of those guys who always got picked last.

Criminal law in this country has changed radically. Just because you’ve committed a crime doesn’t mean you should be punished for it. This concept explains a lot about what’s been going on lately.

You may not have realized this was the law, but that’s only because you’re boringly politically correct.

I know this because President Donald Trump, apparently after watching the Kentucky Derby or hearing it mentioned on Fox, issued a tweet that contained this sentence: “Only in these days of political correctness could such an overturn event occur.”

In case you missed the Derby or have no idea what it is, the horse that won it (yes, horses are involved) was disqualified for interfering with a couple of other horses behind him. Normally, that’s what happens when there’s interference.

The president, however, felt that was wrong. Punishment doesn’t fit crime. Why be so prissy about breaking rules?

I’m guessing the president would enjoy a basketball game without any free throws and a football game without penalties. You can’t argue that those games wouldn’t be more exciting (not to mention deadly).

So now we know why the Mueller report exonerates the administration. It would be too politically correct to prosecute anyone for anything in there.

A lot of prosecutors are going to be out of work.

Fun fact. Here’s something I bet you didn’t know: flagpoles are a limited government resource. Think about it — it’s true. You don’t see flagpoles on every corner.

I realized this last week after reading a Massachusetts federal judge’s ruling in a dispute over whether a group should be allowed to temporarily raise a Christian flag on one of three poles in front of Boston’s City Hall. Yes, there’s a year’s worth of litigation over this and it isn’t over yet.

A city official told the plaintiffs that the Christian flag would violate both the Establishment Clause and the city’s authority to maintain a “limited government resource.”

You’d think they’d build more flagpoles.

My favorite part of the ruling is this: “Plaintiffs allege that the City’s policy of displaying only non-secular flags is ‘overtly hostile to religion and violates the Establishment Clause.’”

That sounds more like the Disestablishment Clause.

Another fun fact. This appeared in a Los Angeles Superior Court complaint filed on behalf of actress Brooke Shields last week: “Shields’s eyebrows have been the subject of profiles in media such as Instyle, Elle and Vogue, who even ran a story entitled, 17 Times Brooke Shields’s Eyebrows Were the Best Thing in the Room.”

And you thought quality journalism was on the wane.

Now do you think the story was about the eyebrows or a series of really terrible rooms?

Sentence of the week. This is from a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruling: “The fact that Webber was not wearing a hardhat did not cause the branch to fall and hit him on the head.”

Unless the tree couldn’t resist an inviting target.

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