Model Penal Code: Official Draft and Explanatory Notes : Complete Text of Model Penal Code As Adopted at the 1962 Annual Meeting of the American Law Institute at washin

by Unknown Author

Hardcover

About the author

Books with known authors are imported from Amazon to this profile. Please do not merge this profile into Unknown.

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Model penal code v. 1

I grabbed this off the library shelf because I’m wrestling with a particular conceptual problem I can’t talk about. Ended up reading the whole first volume and am going to try to pick up the other two. It had me at this:

(1) The general purposes of the provisions governing the definition of offenses are:
(a) to forbid and prevent conduct that unjustifiably and inexcusably inflicts or threatens substantial harm to individual or public interests;
(b) to subject to public control persons whose conduct indicates that they are disposed to commit crimes;
(c) to safeguard conduct that is without fault from condemnation as criminal;
(d) to give fair warning of the nature of the conduct declared to constitute an offense;
(e) to differentiate on reasonable grounds between serious and minor offenses." § 1.02, at 13

And its fascinating. We’ve largely failed at (a) because so many folks who are committing violent crimes aren’t acting rationally at the time and so many folks who reason their ways into committing other types of crime (say, wage theft) reasonably believe they’ll never get caught.
The criminal law might succeed with (b) but we don’t meaningfully track it.
(c) is the Blake case which, if we’d followed the principles in the code, we would have avoided entirely because there would have been a mens rea element in the statute. Great discussion in the book at 18. (“The penal law promotes the general security not only by repressing conduct that is properly condemned as criminal but also – and no less importantly – by building confidence that those whose conduct doe not warrant moral condemnation will not be convicted of a crime.”)
(d) As a rule of construction, okay, yeah, we follow Holmes’ Path of the Law and strictly construe criminal statutes.
(e) . . . maybe. Sometimes. But see Blake again.

There’s parts that haven’t aged well, especially around how it discusses gender and sexual orientation, and it simply never discusses race, which is a profound omission given how our racial history has intersected with the penal law in profound and unsettling ways. But it’s an earnest attempt by some really smart folks to try to build a comprehensive penal code based on clearly articulated and somewhat testable principles.