It found numerous damaging consequences that flow from inappropriate federalization of crime, among them: The panel, composed of a broad cross section of prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, law professors, and law enforcement officials, received input from virtually every major national organization involved in the criminal justice system. Perhaps of greater significance, several recently enacted federal statutes, often championed by politicians because they supposedly would reduce crime, have hardly been used at all. The other 95 percent are state and local prosecutions. The ABA report, backed up by extensive statistical data, supports the position of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who deplored the expanded federalization of crime in his annual report on the federal judiciary last December, when he cited the tendency of Congress “to appear responsive to every highly publicized societal ill or sensational crime.”įurthermore, as the task force found, “increased federalization is rarely, if ever, likely to have any appreciable effect on the categories of violent crime that most concern Americans, because in practice federal law enforcement can only reach a small percent of such activity.” Court statistics show that federal prosecutions constitute less than 5 percent of all the prosecutions in the nation. In 1994, one crime bill alone created two dozen new federal offenses. Federal crimes now range from serious but purely local offenses such as car jacking and church burning to trivial matters such as disrupting a rodeo or damaging a livestock facility. Hardly any crime, no matter how local in nature, is beyond the jurisdiction of federal law enforcement authorities. Today there are more than three thousand federal crimes on the books. But in recent years, as Senator Joseph Biden has put it, “we federalize everything that walks, talks, and moves.” This endangers the constitutional principle of decentralized law enforcement authority that has worked well in America and that has been a bulwark against the centralization of police power at the national level.įor most of the nation’s history, federal criminal jurisdiction was limited to offenses that involved truly national matters, such as treason, counterfeiting, bribery of federal officials, and perjury in the federal courts. Most troubling is the high percentage of these federal crimes that duplicate state laws that have been on the books for years. “Let’s not make a federal case out of it” is hardly a common theme in Washington these days, but that’s the conclusion of a new report, prepared by an American Bar Association (ABA) task force, titled “The Federalization of Criminal Law.” The panel, which I headed, concludes that the increasing enactment of federal offenses that duplicate state laws not only is unnecessary and unwise but also has harmful implications for the whole criminal justice system.įollowing a two-year study by experts in all segments of the criminal justice process, the task force documented the explosive growth of federal criminal law, including the startling fact that more than 40 percent of the federal criminal provisions enacted since the Civil War became law in just the past three decades.

Edwin meese ii