Edwards, James. "Coming Clean About the Criminal Law". Criminal Law and Philosophy, Vol.5, No.3 (2011): 315-332.

Edwards, James. "Coming Clean About the Criminal Law". Criminal Law and Philosophy, Vol.5, No.3 (2011): 315-332.

• The author argues that a number of developments in English criminal law have been punishing previously legal behavior and not informing the public about the extent of these changes. The English government continues to claim that law is generally easy to obey and created to steer individuals onto a legal path, whereas English law is frequently unclear and used to 'trick' accidental lawbreakers (316).
• A number of recent laws cast a very wide net in terms of criminal culpability, including criminalizing a failure to inform the police about threatened crimes and possessing material useful to terrorism (317). The state has an immense ability to publicize the extend of these laws through public information campaigns, and yet it does not. If anything, the English government encourages a general ignorance about the scope of criminal offenses (18-19).
• Most major laws were created with the express intent of reducing the criminal behavior through its criminalization, such as laws against murder preventing murder. For this to have an effect, though, information about the law must be widely distributed (320).
• Since many English laws are not widely publicized or understood, the intended effects of law cannot be achieved. Rational citizens will not avoid crimes if they do not know they exist, and moral citizens cannot self-police if they are not aware of the law. Lack of publicity thus undermines the supposed purpose of law (320).
• Many English laws like this exist because they were not created for the general enforcement of morals among the public, and are very rarely used to prosecuted common acts. Instead, they were created as easy, alternative ways to prosecute those suspected of major wrongdoing related to the offense (322).
• For example, a law against being near an site suspected of being used for the training of terrorist groups was not created to prosecute janitors working in terror centers, it was created so that people strongly suspected of abetting terror could be more easily prosecuted with less evidence (322).
• The use of criminal law as a method of making the task of law enforcement easier by criminalizing offenses related to the 'actual crime' damages the role of law in society, by using an inherently judgmental tool to condemn behaviors that should not be condemned (322).
• This is a dangerous innovation because it introduces an element outside of the formal law that strongly influences conviction based on that law. In the case of a law banning all sexual activity between minors, the formal text does not contain any mention of coercion being a condition for conviction, yet the courts only use the law to criminalize minors coercing others into sex (323).
• This created a division between crimes people are charged with and the crimes that they are arrest for. Police general stick to the recognized 'real' crimes in organizing arrests, but this reason for arrest may be entirely different then the crime a person is charged with committing (323).
• The distinction created is important because generally the state recognizes that the actual offending behavior, the spurious charge of a common activity, should not be criminal. Therefore, the state is prosecuting someone for something they think shouldn't be criminal, just because it is easier than proving guilty to an actually criminal act (324).
• The author contends that criminal law must be held to the standard of answerability, meaning that a justification should be publicly provided for the existence of any law which limits the liberty of citizens (325-326). Many of these laws impose large limitations on behavior, for which the state cannot provide any explanation (329).