If I believe, in good faith, I have not broken the law. I should not be convicted.
Also note that there are good-faith defenses to all sorts of crimes, because (for example) there is a difference between knowingly defrauding a customer and just making a mistake.
They did, however, violate the Fourth Amendment. Per the court.
Judge Magit violated the amendment by issuing the warrant.
I take it fentanyl is some illegal drug, but some people can legally sell drugs (licensed apothecaries). If they go for a license, get it approved, then sell a drug, and then it turns out the license is invalid due to no fault of their own and should not have been issued, I don't think anyone is surprised if the apothecary is not on the hook for that. But I'm not a lawyer, much less a judge, so who knows what they'd actually rule
In the example where "someone told me to do it", you're glossing over evidence (this was in writing, not hearsay). In the example of addictive substances, you can be reasonably expected to do your own research and not take a random person's written word for it. The analogy is so hyperbolic, I don't get the impression you're trying to reasonably think about this case
Drug dealers then went to their lawyers and asked if certain formulations fell under the Analog Act. Their lawyer said no and wrote out how they were legal and didn't fall under the analog act. They sold the drugs and went to prison even though they thought they were in the clear (so good faith should apply, right?).
This is a real case that I have experience with so not sure why I'm being called out as acting in bad faith or making up a ridiculous scenario. This is a real scenario with the people sitting in prison still (for another 5 years).
If there is no such license you can apply for, I'm not sure there exists a system by which you can be indemnified from criminal prosecution for doing such sales (or possession or whatever the case may be)
The question reminded me of a 2019 case where two parties went to the judge to get a ruling on something, without there being damages or claims. (Here, a potential buyer and seller could ask to decide whether a certain substance would be legal to sell before the sale happens, steering clear of prosecution until there is a ruling.) Reading that case back, the legal provision that made this possible only applies to situations where the parties are free to do whatever (such as with a contract dispute); it does not work for creating jurisprudence on criminal law. Asking ChatGPT as a quick last attempt, it proposes to ask a lawyer (you've shared how well that worked) or to sue the government over the law that makes the sale illegal which would be void if the judge goes "this substance doesn't fall under that law anyway" and then you've got jurisprudence to work with. The latter sounds a bit strange, not sure if that's actually possible, but it'd be worth exploring for such edge cases where it may or may not be criminal to do a certain thing
Of course, I totally see how this is a double standard: you've done your homework and to the best of everyone's knowledge it's legal, and then when it turns out you're wrong, whether you get sent to prison depends on whether it was the government who sanctioned it. Everyone can make an honest mistake, government or no
I don't know the intentions of the drugs dealers you have experience with. If there are legit purposes for the specific analog they were selling (that is, purposes falling outside of the spirit of the law that makes fentanyl (analogs) illegal) then it seems strange that a judge would send them to prison for years. Was a long prison sentence perhaps compulsory due to some minimum sentence requirement as part of this war on drugs thing? Wondering this since our government is implementing more and more minimum punishments despite research showing this does not deter the behavior and also increases recidivism due to the longer time you spend outside society, losing any position that you had in it. It's great
The drug dealers were ex-marines that received debilitating injuries fighting in Afghanistan, became addicted to pain pills when they came home, and because of their injuries were unable to work. So they were selling drugs. Then the analog act came around, which made a large amount of closely related drugs illegal. They were drug dealers, and should be in prison. Someone died from these weird compounds they were bringing in from China to try and skirt the Analog Act. But these guys in their head justified it because they were using the same compounds, and they felt they needed to subdue their pain. But these guys also didn't hide it. They had a lawyer that they ran things by. They bought cars from dealerships with their money, not trying to hide it in any way.
I don't think 'good faith' should apply to them. But also don't think 'good faith' should supersede the United States Constitution. If it applies to the prosecution side, it should apply to the defense. A judge shouldn't be able to waive away our Constitution just because it's inconvenient in a prosecution. In the US, even if something is determined unconstitutional and that determination means people should be released from prison, every single person impacted has to go to court and prove it applies to them. We should release people imprisoned unConstitutionally, but we don't, because again it's inconvenient to the legal system. There is even a time limit on those people to go to court, and if they don't in time (say because they don't know, because they aren't notified) then they are bared from bringing it up in a motion to the court.
Drugs are a hard one. I blew up my life over addiction. Many around me were to. Some were using drugs, some alcohol, some gambling, some risky sex. One interesting feature of American society is we used to give people a second chance. For old guys like me, many of the characters in westerns were criminals turned better as law men one town over. These guys would have been completely different if they were receiving adequate pain care and some sort of job opportunities when they came back from war. I think society needs that. But it also can't enable bad behavior. Interesting/complex times.
Sorry for my wall of text.
The judge erred in granting the warrant, the police violated the above statute. Them being unaware would be an affirmative defense, that does require admission of the above crime.
What they cannot do is violate certain constitutional rights to do so without triggering exclusion.
So this isn’t really a good argument even if we ignore the fact that it’s a non sequitur.
A better argument is that the good faith exception, while making sense in principle, can easily be abused by the police to make illegally obtained evidence look like it was done in good faith, and therefore the exception itself should be removed because of how difficult it is to actually gauge and enforce.
Juries usually don't decide sentencing, and even if they did I don't think that would matter with crimes viewed as wrong in themselves (mala in se) though it might with crimes viewed as wrong because they are prohibited (mala prohibita).
I'm not sure how on earth someone could be remorseful for a mala prohibitum victimless offense while simultaneously maintaining they in good faith thought they were following the law. Any expression of those two views simultaneously would in practice be seen as not much more than "sorry I got caught -- doing something I thought was legal."
How often does this actually happen in criminal matters?
Or employing illegal aliens. "But they told me they had work visas, and they showed me what later turned out to be expertly-counterfeited visas!" Why shouldn't that get you off the hook, if true?
Cody Wilson -- Went to a sugar daddy website that verifies IDs to ensure all 'escorts' are 18 which is a pretty good faith way to do it IMO. Woman seemingly had fake ID at some point, and also lied and turned out to be like 16 or 17. At some point later she underwent counseling at school and admitted she was an escort, after which a criminal investigation happened and Mr. Wilson was arrested. As a strict liability crime, there was no defense that due diligence was done to ensure the escort was 18.
CSAM and child sexual assault are one of the few areas of criminal law where we confer (in my opinion, correctly) absolute liability.
Broadly speaking, I think more cops have been convicted of duty-related crimes than unsuspecting random convicted of and punished for a crime they didn’t know they committed.
In that case, even the Navy, which almost never does this to felons, terminated him with an honorable discharge and even let him run up all his liberty time before releiving him.
What justification do you have for the view that it is right that in some US states you can be convicted of a crime despite never having done anything wrong, with no negligence, no recklessness, no intent, no knowledge, nothing? Because that goes against the most fundamental precept of criminal law: the requirement of both actus reus and mens rea. With no guilty mind there is no criminal liability.
Not long ago a guy was put in jail for creating business-card sized metal sheets with the image of a 'lightning link' (machinegun conversion device) on it. Not the actual device, just a picture of it etched <0.001" into the metal. Clearly just art, and even when the ATF cut it out they could not get it function as a machine gun. They gave it to an actual machinist, and even after a day he could not get it to function as a machine gun. They could only get it to do anything by literally jamming it into the gun and making it do hammer follow, which every AR-15 can do with the parts already in it.
Up until the guy was convicted I don't think anyone had any idea a picture of a machine gun on a metal card was a machine gun. They even convicted the guy advertising it, who never as far as I know actually distributed one.