Source: reason.com 5/14/25
[ACSOL is posting this because, although not specific to registrants, registrants as well as members of their families would likely agree with its contents]
After mountain runner Michelino Sunseri ascended and descended Grand Teton in record time last fall, his corporate sponsor, The North Face, heralded his achievement as “an impossible dream—come true.” Then came the nightmare: Federal prosecutors charged Sunseri with a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail for using a trail that the National Park Service described as closed, although it had never bothered to clearly inform the public of that designation.
Sunseri unwittingly violated one of the myriad federal regulations that carry criminal penalties—a body of law so vast and obscure that no one knows exactly how many offenses it includes. An executive order that President Donald Trump issued last week aims to ameliorate the injustices caused by the proliferation of such agency-defined crimes, which turn the rule of law into a cruel joke.
The Code of Federal Regulations “contains over 48,000 sections, stretching over 175,000 pages—far more than any citizen can possibly read, let alone fully understand,” Trump’s order notes. “Worse, many [regulations] carry potential criminal penalties for violations.”
How many? As Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and co-author Janie Nitze note in their 2024 book on “the human toll of too much law,” even experts cannot say for sure, although “estimates suggest that at least 300,000 federal agency regulations carry criminal sanctions today.”
At the federal level, in other words, regulatory crimes outnumber statutory crimes—another uncertain tally—by a factor of roughly 60 to 1. Since the latter category has exploded during the last century, that is no small feat, but it is what you might expect when unaccountable bureaucrats are free to invent crimes.
“Many of these regulatory crimes are ‘strict liability’ offenses, meaning that citizens need not have a guilty mental state to be convicted of a crime,” Trump notes. “This status quo is absurd and unjust. It allows the executive branch to write the law, in addition to executing it.”
Trump said prosecutors generally should eschew criminal charges for regulatory violations based on strict liability and focus on cases where the evidence suggests the defendant knowingly broke the rules. Trump also instructed federal agencies to “explicitly describe” conduct subject to criminal punishment under new regulations and prepare lists of regulatory violations that already can be treated as crimes.
This may be the first thing this administration has said that I agree with. Elected officials should write laws, not government agencies.
I oppose strict liability and believe the government should provide evidence a defendant knowingly broke the rules.
The registry and its bloated restrictions are more than a cruel joke it’s just damn cruelty based on fear and myths. Has the registry ever prevented or solved a sex crime? No. Have any of these laws named after a victim actually honor them? No. Sex crimes punishments far outweighs the crime.
Trump notes. “This status quo is absurd and unjust. It allows the executive branch to write the law, in addition to executing it.”
Hmmm… Where have we heard that before?
Penalties must be enforced against all those taking part in a “strict liability offense” of Unlawful violation of the Separation of Powers Doctrine, by people in positions of trust.
This is a continuation of what he did in his first administration. What’s the statistic? Everybody could be a felon everyday by breaking two laws they didn’t know about to begin with? Yet the court says you have to know the law regardless and not knowing it is not a defense.
Years back, someone wrote a book discussing how the average American commits three felonies a day. In fact, the book is titled, “Three Felonies A Day: How The Feds Target The Innocent.”