In his column today, Sheldon Richman writes about the prosecution of a man for the supposed crime of producing coins. He wasn’t counterfeiting the clad junk coins that are legal tender, but was producing coins from silver. The feds evidently employed a tortured reading of the law to make their case, a phenomenon we’ve been seeing more and more often. In my comment, I noted how this fits the pattern Harvey Silverglate wrote about in his book Three Felonies a Day: the government identifies someone they want to nail, then stretch one or more of our vague statutes to accomplish that.