Court Opinion

ID: 9491603
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:18:38.803833+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:50.626649
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Chief Judge,
dissenting.
It is wrong to convict a person of a crime if he had no reason to believe that the act for which he was convicted was a crime, or even that it was wrongful. This is one of the bedrock principles of American law. It lies at the heart of any civilized system of law. Yet like most legal generalizations, it can be maintained only with careful qualification. We generally do not require prosecutors to prove that the defendant knew that he was violating the law, even in cases in which the law is sufficiently remote from the moral code of the society that such knowledge cannot be presumed or its absence taken as evidence of culpable moral obtuseness. We say instead that “ignorance of the law is no defense,” and do not pause to consider the consistency of this maxim with what we elsewhere affirm to be a fundamental constituent of the rule of law and .the Constitution of the United States. In the unusual circumstances of this case, the maxim of expedience should yield to the bedrock principle; and there is enough room in the statutory language to achieve this end without having to trundle out the heavy artillery of constitutional law.
Congress created, and the Department of Justice sprang, a trap on Carlton Wilson as a result of which he will serve more than three years in federal prison for an act (actually an omission to act) that he could not have suspected was a crime or even a civil wrong. We can release him from the trap by interpreting the statute under which he was convicted to require the government to prove that the violator knew that he was committing a crime. This is the standard device by which the courts avoid having to explore the outer boundaries of the constitutional requirement of fair notice of potential criminal liability. See, e.g., Ratzlaf v. United States, 510 U.S. 135, 114 S.Ct. 655, 126 L.Ed.2d 615 (1994); Staples v. United States, 511 U.S. 600, 618-19, 114 S.Ct. 1793, 128 L.Ed.2d 608 (1994).
Section 922(g)(8) of the federal criminal code (Title 18), when read in conjunction with section 924(a)(2), makes it a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison for any person to possess a gun if he is subject to a domestic-relations restraining order against stalking *294or otherwise threatening a spouse or child. The first of these sections, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), contains no reference to the defendant’s knowledge. But this section merely makes the conduct (the possession of a gun by a person subject to a stalking order) unlawful; it imposes no penalty for a violation. The penalty provision is section 924(a)(2), and it requires that the defendant have “knowingly” violated section 922(g).
The stalking provision was enacted in 1994 and the number of prosecutions for violating it has been minuscule (perhaps fewer than 10, though I have not been able to discover the exact number, which is not a reported statistic) in relation to the probable number of violations. I estimate that every year the law has been in effect almost one hundred thousand restraining orders against domestic violence have been issued (estimated from Patricia Tjaden & Nancy Thoenes, Stalking in America: Findings From the National Violence Against Women Survey 3, 6, 12 (U.S. Dept, of Justice, April 1998); Adele Harrell & Barbara E. Smith, “Effects of Restraining Orders on Domestic Violence Victims,” in Do Arrests and Restraining Orders Work? 219 (Eve S. Buzawa & Carl G. Buzawa eds.1996)). Since 40 percent of U.S. households own guns (U.S. Dept, of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 1996 167 (1997)), there can be very little doubt that a large percentage of those orders were issued against gun owners.
How many of these gun owners, when they got notice of the restraining order, dispossessed themselves of their guns? I doubt that any did. The law is malum prohibitum, not malum in se; that is, it is not the kind of law that a lay person would intuit existed because the conduct it forbade was contrary to the moral code of his society. Compare United States v. Robinson, 137 F.3d 652, 654 (1st Cir.1998) (“child pornography offends the moral sensibility of the community at large”), with United States v. Grigsby, 111 F.3d 806, 816-21 (11th Cir.1997) (importation of ivory in violation of the African Elephant Conservation Act not criminal without knowledge of the Act). Yet the Department of Justice took no steps to publicize the existence of the law until long after Wilson violated it, even to the extent of advising the state judiciaries of it so that judges could warn defendants in domestic-relations disputes. At argument the prosecutor told us that the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois has made no effort to advise the local judiciary of the law. Later he sent us two bulletins from Department of Justice headquarters in Washington to the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices throughout the country directing the U.S. Attorneys to “educate your state and local counterparts on these provisions. Their assistance, particularly in working with local judges to fashion domestic violence protective orders, is essential to the effective implementation of the [provisions]” (emphasis added). But these bulletins — a tacit admission that four years after the enactment of the law, the word hadn’t gotten out even to judges — were not circulated until after Wilson’s trial.
The federal criminal code contains thousands of separate prohibitions, many ridiculously obscure, such as the one against using the coat of arms of Switzerland in advertising, 18 U.S.C. § 708, or using “Johnny Horizon” as a trade name without the authorization of the Department of the Interior. 18 U.S.C. § 714. The prohibition in section 922(g)(8) is one of the most obscure. A person owns a hunting rifle. He knows or should know that if he is convicted of a felony he will have to get rid of the gun; if he doesn’t know, the judge or the probation service will tell him. But should he be made subject to a restraining order telling him to keep away from his ex-wife, whom he has not ever threatened with his hunting rifle (the judge who issued the restraining order could but did not issue an order forbidding Wilson to possess a firearm as long as the order was in force, 725 ILCA 5/112A-14(b)(14.5)), it will not occur to him that he must give up the gun unless the judge issuing the order tells him. The judge didn’t tell Wilson; so far as appears, the judge was unaware of the law. Wilson’s lawyer didn’t tell him either — Wilson didn’t have a lawyer. No one told him. And there is no reason that he should have guessed, for while he had beaten his wife and threatened to kill her, there' is no indication that guns played any part in the beating or *295the threats, The fact that the restraining order contained no reference to guns may have lulled him into thinking that, as long as he complied with the order and stayed away from his wife, he could cany on as before.
When a defendant is morally culpable for failing to know or guess that he is violating some law (as would be the case of someone who committed a burglary without thinking — so warped was his moral sense — that burglaiy might be a crime), we rely on conscience to provide all the notice that is required. Sometimes the existence of the law is common knowledge, as in the case of laws forbidding people to own hand grenades (see United States v. Freed, 401 U.S. 601, 609, 91 S.Ct. 1112, 28 L.Ed.2d 356 (1971)), forbidding convicted felons to own any firearms, and requiring a license to carry a handgun. And sometimes, though the law is obscure to the population at large and nonintuitive, the defendant had a reasonable opportunity to learn about it, as in the ease of persons engaged in the shipment of pharmaceuticals who run afoul of the criminal prohibitions in the federal food and drug laws. See United States v. Dotterweich, 320 U.S. 277, 64 S.Ct. 134, 88 L.Ed. 48 (1943). We want people to familiarize themselves with the laws bearing-on their activities. But a reasonable opportunity doesn’t mean being able to go to the local law library and read Title 18. It would be preposterous to suppose that someone from Wilson’s milieu is able to take advantage of such an opportunity. If none of the conditions that make it reasonable to dispense with proof of knowledge of the law is present, then to intone “ignorance of the law is no defense” is to condone a violation of fundamental principles for the sake of a modest economy in the administration of criminal justice.
Actually a false economy. The purpose of criminal laws is to bring about compliance with desired norms of behavior. In the present case it is to reduce domestic violence by getting guns out of the hands of people who are behaving menacingly toward (in the usual case) an estranged or former spouse. H. Conf. Rep. No. 711, 103d Cong, 2d Sess. 391 (1994), U.S. Code Cong. & Admin. News at 1839, 1859. This purpose is ill served by keeping the law a secret, which has been the practical upshot of the Department of Justice’s failure — until too late, at least for Wilson — either to enforce the law vigorously or to notify the relevant state officials of the law’s existence. In such circumstances the law is not a deterrent. It is a trap.
All the Department of Justice had to do in order to preserve the rule of law was to notify all state courts that have a domestic-relations jurisdiction of the existence and terms of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8) and to suggest that every domestic-relations restraining order contain a printed warning that the defendant is violating federal criminal law unless he immediately divests himself of any firearms and ammunition that he owns. Domestic-relations judges would be happy to include such a warning because it would give added teeth to their orders. At slight cost— negative, really, when one considers how compliance with the law would soar — -the administration of the law would be brought into conformity with the rule of law. The bulletins that the home office of the Department of Justice has sent the U.S. Attorneys is a belated but welcome recognition of my point but came too late to help Wilson avoid becoming a federal felon.
We thus have an example of those -“highly technical statutes that present ... the danger of ensnaring individuals engaged in apparently innocent conduct” of which the Supreme Court spoke in Bryan v. United States, — U.S. -, 118 S.Ct. 1939, 1946-47, 141 L.Ed.2d 197 (1998). This case differs from Bryan because the statute here is easy to understand; but it is hard to discover, and that comes to the same thing, as we know from Lambert v. California, 355 U.S. 225, 78 S.Ct. 240, 2 L.Ed.2d 228 (1957). The law challenged in that case required a felon to register with the police. Lambert, a felon, failed to do so. She “had no actual knowledge of the requirement”; there was no showing of “the probability of such knowledge”; “violation of [the law’s] provisions [was] unaccompanied by any activity whatever”; and “circumstances which might move one to inquire as to the necessity of registration [were] completely lacking.” Id. at 227-29, 78 S.Ct. 240. The Court voided Lam*296bert’s conviction. We should do the same for Wilson’s conviction.
Bryan’s reference to “apparently innocent conduct” describes the ownership of rifles and handguns, for personal use and not for sale, by nonfelons in this nation’s gun-friendly culture. “[T]here is a long tradition of widespread lawful gun ownership by private individuals in this country.” Staples v. United States, supra, 511 U.S. at 610, 114 S.Ct. 1793. Such ownership is as innocent as making huge cash deposits, or having a large professional income but not filing income tax returns — activities that the Supreme Court has held do not subject a person to criminal liability if he is ignorant of the law. Ratzlaf v. United States, supra; Cheek v. United States, 498 U.S. 192, 111 S.Ct. 604, 112 L.Ed.2d 617 (1991); see also Liparota v. United States, 471 U.S. 419, 105 S.Ct. 2084, 85 L.Ed.2d 434 (1985); United States v. Curran, 20 F.3d 560, 569-71 (3d Cir.1994).
It is true that strict liability, of which convicting a person for conduct that he could not, realistically, have known was criminal is an example, is not unknown to the criminal law. There are strict-liability crimes, see, e.g., United States v. Park, 421 U.S. 658, 670-73, 95 S.Ct. 1903, 44 L.Ed.2d 489 (1975); United States v. Balint, 258 U.S. 250, 252-53, 42 S.Ct. 301, 66 L.Ed. 604 (1922); United States v. Dotterweich, supra; Mueller v. Sullivan, 141 F.3d 1232, 1235-36 (7th Cir.1998), which is to say crimes that can be committed without any culpable state of mind whatever. And many crimes have an element of strict liability, the classic example being statutory rape in jurisdictions in which the girl’s apparent maturity is not a defense. See, e.g., State v. Yanez, 716 A.2d 759 (R.I.1998); Richard A. Posner and Katharine B. Sil-baugh, A Guide to America’s Sex Laws, ch. 3 (1996). But the existence and content of the criminal prohibition in these cases are not hidden; the defendant is warned to steer well clear of the core of the offense (as in the statutory-rape case; and see United States v. Anton, 683 F.2d 1011, 1019-20 (7th Cir.1982) (dissenting opinion)), or to take the utmost care (the food and drug eases), or to familiarize himself with the laws relating to his business (emphasized in Mueller). None of these rationales applies to Wilson. His is the classic case of the unwarned defendant. He is entitled to a new trial at which the government would have to prove that he knew that continued possession of guns after the restraining order was entered was a crime. This conclusion is a linguistically permissible interpretation of the statute because only the knowing violation of section 922(g)(8) carries a criminal penalty; the interpretation avoids a constitutional issue; and it is supported by Lambert, Ratzlaf, Cheek, and other decisions.
I agree with my colleagues’ discussion of the other issues that the appeal presents.