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Comment by gpt5 | Hacker News Reader

Selective enforcement is bad. The fact that the law says that you could go to prison for one year for not filing taxes on time, but that it's rarely enforced means that they should fix the law.

Using it only on "bad guys" is a recipe for the government punishing people that disagrees with them.

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I believe selective enforcement is a core part of policing in the US. No police agency has enough resources to go after everybody who breaks the law, so they make examples of high profile defendants to deter others.

One of two things is true. Either they believe everyone should be doing 30 years (preposterous) or they know they are committing a grave injustice against someone.

There is no reasonable interpretation of selective enforcement.

.... or crimes occur on a continuum of "technically bad" and "omfg bad", and all instances are not identical. Nothing about your dichotomy seems true in all cases, even if it is sometimes (maybe even often) obviously true.

Thats not how the law works. It's not code, its run by people for people.

I've heard this from multiple people explaining stuff to me -- they were all Americans.

Where are you from? If it's from continental Europe, I wonder if that's the difference. We get our laws from English Common Law instead of civil law (except Louisiana).

Can we get a brit in here to see what their conception of the law is?

How courts interpret legislation and precedent differs a lot between common and civil law jurisdictions, but that's got nothing to do with how policing operates. Police everywhere can choose not to take action unless you're talking about a zero-tolerance society with Stasi-like levels of monitoring.

"Selecting policing" is just "discretion", that particular phrase is possibly US-centric but the concept itself isn't.

I would imagine how likely courts are to convict has to impact that discretion for any police force that's judged based on some sort of metric.

Or is the US the only place that really does that?

I'm sure every police force takes that into account along with other factors, there are always laws that become outdated and are arrested for less, prosecuted less and convicted of less over time. And in common law jurisdictions precedent can impact the scope of existing law and change how police will enforce it.

I'm not American.

I misread as “the” people and was confused. Sad.

Punishing someone more than they deserve in order to communicate a point to others, strikes me as a kind of political agenda, not justice.

“Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

Focus on ‘unusual’. All the words in this document have a meaning.

The law is a political institution

>Using it only on "bad guys" is a recipe for the government punishing people that disagrees with them.

Indeed that's exactly how it is being used if it's true that they throw the book at public figures for making political statements like Wesley Snipes.

Don't you also go to jail if you can't pay them?

Maybe possible? But generally in that case when there was no fraud, you just get a bankruptcy-resistant lien that follows you to your grave, and whatever enforcement actions accompany liens. Generally again, absent fraud, they'll work out a high-interest installment plan.

The tax code is too confusing and subjective to send everyone who makes a mistake to prison.

Jail is for people who actively dodge taxes, not someone who submitted their taxes a few days late.

That also sounds like a problem.

I don't think its selective enforcement so much as different crimes that can appear superficially to fit the same facts.

Filing late because you made a mistake will cost you interest plus possibly a penalty relating to the amount. Tax evasion is a crime which can lead to jail time. The system will decide which one fits better based on your behavior, including how cooperative you are when they investigate it.

Just like if you hit someone in the head and they die. Maybe you will get charged with murder or maybe they will believe it is an accident. There's really no way to remove these human factors from the justice system.

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