Game Perfectly Sums Up Everything Wrong With Prosecutors

What they do for fun tells you a lot about what's broken in America.

In 2007, professor Tim Wu of Columbia Law School recounted a game played by some prosecutors. One would name a famous person — “say, Mother Teresa or John Lennon” — and other prosecutors would try to imagine “a plausible crime for which to indict him or her,” usually a felony plucked from “the incredibly broad yet obscure crimes that populate the U.S. Code like a kind of jurisprudential minefield.” Did the person make “false pretenses on the high seas”? Is he guilty of “injuring a mailbag”?

— George Will, citing Professor Tim Wu on what federal prosecutors do for fun. Frankly, these are some weak sauce examples. Let’s see… John Lennon, drugs and drugs and drugs. Mother Teresa, all kinds of embezzling. Let’s up the degree of difficulty here, Tim!

Sponsored