How the “Independent” Fourth Estate Has Failed in its Critical Duty

Fourth installment in a five-part series on Silverglate’s book, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent . In a discussion on WAMU Radio yesterday, host Kojo Nnamdi noted that vagueness in the federal criminal law has recently made “strange bedfellows” of the political left and right. This same “emerging consensus” was also the subject of an insightful November 23 article by Adam Liptak, The New York Times’ Supreme Court reporter. What has occasioned this coming together? As I mentioned here on Monday , individuals and organizations of all political stripes are realizing the danger to all when prosecutors are empowered with exceedingly broad and—worse—hard-to-define federal laws. A diverse coalition of groups—including the Heritage Foundation , the Federalist Society , the Cato Institute , the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers , and the ACLU , among others—have been sounding a clarion call against this species of executive expansion. They have pointed out that, from webmasters to fund managers , no segment of civil society is safe. But this phenomenon is not new.

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How the “Independent” Fourth Estate Has Failed in its Critical Duty