You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life - Albert Camus

Bloods, Crips, and Jihadists

by Lee

It seems that New York is using terrorism laws to prosecute non-terrorist activity.

Morales, 22, was indicted on murder and other charges as acts of terror in May, along with 18 other members of the St. James Boys Gang, a Mexican and Mexican-American street gang.

Morales faces the most serious charge of second-degree murder as a terrorist act. A New York grand jury returned the charges against him in connection with the shooting death of 10-year-old Melanie Mendez, who died from gunshot wounds two years earlier.

Morales plans to plead innocent, said his attorney, Lewis Alperin. No date has yet been set for his trial.

Morales is the first gang member in New York to be indicted under the state’s terrorism statute, which became law shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

If the charges did not include the terrorism stipulation, he would face a sentence of 25 years to life if found guilty. With the stipulation, he faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.  ...

A spokeswoman for state Sen. Michael Balvoni, who sponsored the bill, said he does not mind that prosecutors have decided gang violence is a form of domestic terrorism and are using the statute to prosecute Morales.

“Gangs are a forum to promote terrorism,” said Balvoni spokeswoman Lisa Angerame. “Therefore, the anti-terrorism statue would be applicable against them, even if the original intent for this law was not exactly to prosecute them.”

Others say the law is not being used as intended.

“It is not that I want to defend gangs,” said state Rep. Jeffrey Dinowitz. “But it should never be justifiable to use laws with purposes other than their original intent.

“We already have the appropriate laws to prosecute gang members for their crimes,” he added.

I’m not sure how I feel about this.  My gut instinct is to oppose it, because I agree that laws should be used for what they were intended.  However, I can also see how there could be a great deal of overlap between standard criminal enterprise and terrorist activity.  I remember a few years back there was a prosecution of an interstate cigarette smuggling operation which was funneling money to Hamas.  And think of the DC Sniper case.  That was definitely a form of terrorism, yet it doesn’t fit a traditional terrorist-style operation. 

So I don’t think that prosecutors should be limited in how they apply these laws, provided they don’t overstep the laws’s boundaries.  If lawmakers want to revise the laws to limit how prosecutors may use them then that’s the appropriate process.  As I’ve said here a hundred times before, the answer to bad laws isn’t to ignore them, it’s to change them.  I can see the small-government libertarian argument for revising these laws, but I think I’m going to lean the other way this time.  Let the prosecutors use whatever tools are available to them, and if their use of the tools is too broad, it is the job of legislators to change the law appropriately.

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