Hacker News Reader

Comment by PhDuck | Hacker News Reader

Kindness is not strictly speaking always supposed to be legal -- it can be considered kind to aid someone in escaping from prison but it's not legal and I think most would agree that it's wrong/immoral/unethical.

Her defence against the legal trouble is that she did not know about the legal requirement; this is not a valid defence in the eyes of the law and have time upon time be struck down in Danish courts.

View on HN

It is odd to me that the criminality of aiding someone in the interior of a country (I.e. not crossing the border) would hinge on whether they were there legally. As the author mentions, that would seem to put an undue burden on her to determine whether someone's immigration papers are in order. I guess that doesn't stop it from being illegal, but it makes it nearly impossible to determine if one is in compliance.

In the US, we have the defense of "entrapment by estoppel," wherein a government official actively misleads one into thinking an illegal act is legal. That's really closer to what happened in the article than simple ignorance. The author asked police multiple times if what he was doing was illegal.

> this is not a valid defence in the eyes of the law

This is particularly troublesome since some laws are obscure or hidden (you have to know where to look or you just can't have the content of the law - by another law), and also since some (all?) laws are written in a complicated language to be pretty hard to understand.

Imagine laws written in, say, C, in a world without computers - I wonder how law would be practiced there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com