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Cato Institute Weighs in on Cannon v. United States, Hate Crimes, and Double Jeopardy

Today, the Cato Institute (joined by the Reason Foundation and the Individual Rights Foundation) has asked the Supreme Court to grant certiorari in Cannon v. United States, drawing special attention in their brief to the double jeopardy concerns that hate crimes prosecutions raise in what are frequently emotionally highly charged  cases. To quote from Cato attorney Ilya Shapiro’s blog post:

In petitioning the Supreme Court for review, Cannon argues that the HCPA intrudes on the states’ police power to prosecute local crimes and that Congress can’t be the judge of the limits of its own powers, whether under the Thirteenth Amendment or otherwise. Joined by the Reason Foundation and the Individual Rights Foundation, Cato has filed a brief supporting Cannon’s petition. We argue that the use of hate-crime laws to sweep local criminal activity into federal court has nothing to do with stamping out slavery and that the Court should decide the legitimacy of these laws before a more highly politicized case comes along—Ferguson, anyone?—and makes that task even harder.

Not only are federal hate crime laws constitutionally unsound, but, as George Zimmerman’s trial over the death of Trayvon Martin highlighted, they invite people dissatisfied with a state court outcome to demand that the federal government retry unpopular defendants. Giving Congress unlimited power and impairing the fundamental right to be free from double prosecution are too high and too immediate a price to pay to combat the phantom menace of slavery’s return to the United States.

For more about Cannon v. United States, please see this brief by U.S. Commission on Civil Rights members Gail Heriot and Peter Kirsanow (writing in their individual capacities as citizens and not as Commission representatives) and this blog post summarizing the case and the Heriot/Kirsanow brief.

 

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