Louisiana has held itself out as the “Sportsman’s Paradise,” but, according to a new report, it sure has some strange jurisprudence to make this claim.
The Texas Public Policy
Foundation reported
that the Gulf Coast states generally had legal codes and a large number of laws
that criminalized behaviors regarding environmental matters that would
discourage outdoor pursuits such as hunting and fishing, or economic activity
involving natural resources. In aggregate, Louisiana perhaps was the worst off,
with several examples noted about what in an objective way should not be
criminal behavior or, if boorish enough, should merit a minor penalty, yet is
defined criminally with potential severe consequences.
Louisiana’s legal system
creates these crimes with wildly disproportionate penalties that defy common
sense, hence making it too easy for unwitting violation, for two reasons.
First, the way many of the statutes are written, given that it does not presume
that criminal intent in an action is lacking unless some is evidenced, exposes
even the least negligent accused to the most strict penalties. By not having a
“rule of lenity” that assumes, given no evidence of criminal intent that there
was none, the lowest degree of negligence (which is typical when it comes to
non-regulatory criminal actions), this puts great pressure on the accused not
even to go to trial and accept a more lenient, but still disproportional,
punishment.
Second, Louisiana just has
so many specific laws with severe punishments regulating these behaviors, where
there appears to be a strong and positive correlation with potential penalties
– the more obscure, the harsher. For example, if
you’re a shrimper and in the course of practicing your livelihood you find
three unserviceable crab traps and do anything but bring them to the nearest
designated (and “available,” however that is defined) disposal point, you’re
fined at least $500 and
are headed to jail for at least 60 days. Further, if you catch a serviceable
one, you are required to return it to the water with a float you provide; fail
to do that three times, and you face the same penalty.
It’s bad enough that the
state requires you to pick up other people’s trash (or make it trash because it’s
too inconvenient to replace a damaged float), but then to penalize you so
heavily with prosecution stacked against you because you are not assumed not to
have criminal intent even if you knew nothing of an obscure law (and among
wildlife and fisheries law, 107 of 113 statutes adhere to this standard), is
wildly disproportionate. Yes, it’s unfortunate to have unusable junk floating around,
but businessmen who had nothing to do with it should not be made criminals if
they don’t deal with the state’s problem. Either the state should use its own
resources to pick these up, if we think it is such a huge environmental disaster
to have some of these scattered around in a hundred thousand square miles, or
it should pay bonuses to good citizens who clean them up, not prosecute them if
they don’t.
At least, generally
speaking, Louisiana laws on these matters typically have an endangerment
standard that means penalties are not severe as long as humans aren’t
threatened. But not all of them do, and that does not address the larger concern
that the field is over-regulated in the first place. Further, it’s not a
difficult problem to fix by statutes; a few changes
made at the beginning of the state criminal
code will do the job nicely.
Louisiana touts itself as robust in nature’s bounty, but it discourages
recreational use and, worse, commercial harvesting of it through a legal code overzealous
in its impact and tuned more to “gotcha” than reasonable husbanding of
resources. This impedes responsible economic development and needs addressing
at the next available opportunity.
2 comments:
We've had a Governor for over five years now, whom you champion and controls the Legislature.
Why hasn't he fixed these matters?
BOZINGA!!!!!!
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