The law is not “hackable.” Ultimately people are making decisions about guilt and punishment. And judges really, really don’t take kindly to defendants who think they’re trying to outsmart the court.
The law is not “hackable.” Ultimately people are making decisions about guilt and punishment. And judges really, really don’t take kindly to defendants who think they’re trying to outsmart the court.
The point the sibling comments miss is that for the hoi polloi, this one-weird-trick does not work because such laws has been written to broaden the scope as much as possible by heavily relying on intent instead of the micro mechanics (which keep changing) AND the enforcers focus on the intent. For the rich and wealthy, the law may be the same but the enforcement is wildly different because they absolutely have the enforcers on their side. I bet such people don't get strip searched like the unwashed masses as they roll off their private jets.
It absolutely is. The rich and powerful do it all the time.
Although bribery is a felony in itself
> it’s the system working as intended.
Maybe it is
The problem is that the Constitution is broken, and has been since it was drafted. The right to bear arms probably should be conditioned on something more clear than the necessity of a well regulated militia (whatever the hell that means) to the security of a free state. The requirements for warrants probably ought to be weakened somewhat at border crossings. But the plain text of the Constitution does not allow this. The plain text contains no exceptions, and does not empower Congress to make exceptions. But changing the Constitution is hard, so rather than go through this slow, arduous process, everyone just punts the problem to the Court and says, "You deal with it." And so they do. The Court just does end-runs around the Constitution for defensible and practical reasons. But this doesn't change the fact that it is doing end-runs around the Constitution.
But there are often vaguer higher level principles that can stop the fun, involving concept like "reasonable person" and "good faith" which are interpreted by humans. But this also doesn't happen always. Sometimes people do get away on technicalities, though many may suspect corruption in those cases, but sometimes the law is indeed powerless against certain novel tricks. There is no general answer.