Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Overcriminalization in America: Fishing for Justice

A federal prosecutor criminally charged commercial fisherman John Yates with improperly disposing of evidence because he allegedly caught undersized red grouper and then threw the fish overboard. Instead of issuing Yates a civil citation, the prosecutor charged the fisherman with violating the “anti-document-shredding” provision of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, as if he was destroying accounting records.