In this columnProfessor William Anderson, who frequently writes about abuse of the legal system to indict and convict people who haven’t done any harm to anyone or even suspected they were acting in violation of any law, discusses a repugnant case that was tried in Raleigh. It involves a lawyer who has been sent to prison for 30 years because he made a series of deposits into his bank of amounts that were below the federal reporting threshold. A money laundering scheme of some strange sort? No. He just had a lot of legally earned cash in a home safe and wanted to put it somewhere more safe. Realizing that if he deposited the whole amount at once that would trigger potential legal trouble, he made a series of smaller deposits. Making a single such deposit is legal, but because he did it repeatedly, the prosecution claimed that he was in violation of the law. The jury bought the argument and the poor fellow will most likely spend the rest of his life in prison unless this is overturned on appeal.
Harvey Silverglate has a new book out entitled Three Felonies a Day in which he laments the extraordinary growth of prosecutorial power. Evidently, prosecutors like to play a game where they try to come up with plausible grounds for putting the most innocent of people on trial — Mother Theresa, for instance. The law has become so vast and prosecutors have such great power (and often push far beyond their supposed limits anyway) that almost any American can now be convicted of some felony.
