I'm not sure if you're disagreeing with my post, or supporting it.

The fact that a person takes a certain action, for which a reasonable person could foresee the result, is evidence of the person's state of mind.

The entire Clinton thing was a bullshit ignorance of the law and rules for thee not for me thing.

Perform illegal act. Hey, that's illegal! I didn't know it was illegal.  Ignorance of the law is no defense. But I didn't mean to break any laws. Oh, okay.

Wouldn't fly based on this ruling.

An act(building the grenade launcher) was committed. Doesn't matter if the defendant knew it was legal or not.

Good.

"prosecutors are shitting themselves".  oh no.  The older I got, the more I came to realize that prosecutors and police don't actually give a shit about anything except making arrests and getting conviction regardless of what is true or false and regardless of who is innocent or guilty.

Lol...

love it

You sound like the police officer who threatened legislators with arrest if they legalized marijuana, because marijuana is illegal.

Agreed.

I’m ok with this.

People shitting themselves about it are statists.

And you wouldn’t be. His room which you do not have dominion or control over and he has established residence and a clear boundary. The car is also not yours, you’re not operating and had no knowledge and intent. Those are good times on the side of the road to not “never talk to the police” but to say “yeah that’s not mine, I didn’t know he had it and I’m not allowed in there/he’s just giving me a ride to (insert location)” then shut up. A constructive possession charge will go nowhere on the chance your buddy turns on you.

Yay, the war on drugs got harder for the state. Win win.

Okay, so why should I be bothered about it being harder to imprison people who didn't try to break the law or who even may have made some effort to NOT break the law and still had a bad outcome?

FWIW, in my (a little too drug-friendly) state, possession charges require that the possession was knowing or willful.

ETA, for the benefit of the guy who posted about "I didn't know it was illegal to make a grenade launcher," this ruling doesn't touch that. Strict liability has nothing to do with knowing or being ignorant of the law, either way. Strict liability is about ignorance of facts: you're going to Home Despot and your friend asks you to pick up some pipe while you're there. He then turns around and builds the pipe into pipe bombs and you get charged with conspiracy to do bad things with pipe bombs since you supplied a component.

Under strict liability, you're f***ed even if you legitimately thought he was going to put in a new bathtub drain. Without strict liability, the conspiracy charge would require some level of criminal mindset and the prosecutor would need to prove that you knew, or at least should have known, that your buddy was going to do naughty things.

I don't see any problem with this.

I would go further and say that possession of anything shouldn't be a felony.  Felony used to mean a serious crime like arson, aggravated assault, armed robbery, now everything is a felony.   Things that are bad for society should just be treated as contraband and seized and destroyed, make you pay fines or something.  If you are caught selling or distributing a contraband item, that is a separate crime and much more serious than just possessing something.

That’s where I’m at. If OP thinks it’s bad he should cite the portions of the ruling that he disagrees with. Instead he posted the law and the final ruling with no real context.

I skimmed a few of the 63 page doc but c’mon, we’re not all lawyers, give us something to work with.

Some of you guys may be misinterpreting the details a little, though I don't mean to insinuate you're wrong in the broad strokes.

Strict liability in the context of criminal law simply means that there is not a mens rea element to the crime, or at least not a traditional mens rea element.

For the first 100-ish years after the Revolution, state legislatures rarely churned out criminal laws. Instead, the criminal law was the domain of judges who applied and modified English common law***. Each of the states (except LA) adopted English common law upon becoming states. They did so for the simple fact that it's is a pretty good body of law. It covers topics from contracts to estates to torts to criminal law, and darn near everything in between. So, rather than starting with a blank slate, many places around the world have chosen to borrow this body of law (some had no choice or were colonial possession that had used the common law so long that it was all they knew, yet others, like Botswana, adopted the common law with respect to contracts and commercial transactions simply because it's effective and gave them one less thing to think about).

Under English common law, a person is guilty of a criminal offense when they knowingly or intentionally commit a forbidden act (when they commit an actus reus with the appropriate mens rea). This standard works pretty well for most types of traditional criminal offenses. For instance, it's pretty easy to use circumstantial evidence to show that a guy who stabbed his neighbor twenty times not only did the act but did so with a guilty mind. The mens rea element is an important one, since felonies were all punishable by death under English law for most of the common law's history, so it was necessary to distinguish between merely careless acts and willfully malicious acts, lest nominally bad people be punished harshly by the government.

Three issues arose which altered this approach.

First, suppose that a somnambulist rises out of bed and murders his neighbor while asleep, blissfully unaware that he had done anything at all. Surely it can't be said that he did so with a guilty mind. The same is true if he acted while intoxicated, under hypnosis, etc. If you think about it, there are many wrongful acts that can be committed that are not intentional or malicious in any meaningful sense, irrespective of their horrible outcome. How do you punish someone who acts under these conditions if you must prove they acted with a guilty mind? What's the policy solution? Do we simply say sleepwalkers can avoid punishment? If so, wouldn't everyone be tempted to claim they were sleepwalking when they did something bad?

Second, as society has "progressed," hand-wringers and statists alike have formed an alliance to increase the reach of the government's power to punish. Whereas there used to be a clear delineation between acts that were criminal and acts that caused tragic outcomes, yet the adults in the room would say, "Sorry, but we can't criminalize everything. This is really a civil dispute, so sue the offender and leave us out of it," for the past 100 years or so the answer to every problem is for the government to criminalize conduct.

Third, felonies are not all punishable by death. In fact, very few are. So, do we really need to have a mens rea element when all we're talking about is a little jail time?

Over the years, legislatures learned the hard way that passing a law which said, "You can't be drunk in public" was not enough, since a crafty defendant can argue that he didn't possess the proper mens rea to be found guilty of the crime. Out of this process of wherein state legislatures tried to craft laws which criminalized conduct that can't be encompassed under the traditional interpretation of mens rea came a lot of variants of mens rea. Before long, one could be found guilty of a crime for purposely, knowingly, or negligently doing a forbidden thing.

Yet, for some crimes, law makers didn't want you to even have to meet those standards. They simply wanted to be able tp prosecute whether you knew you were breaking the law or not. These are strict liability crimes. In order for strict liability crimes to be constitutional, they must specifically say that they are strict liability crimes. Perfect example (and a case more gun owners need to know about): In the Staples case, a guy bought an AR-15 that allegedly malfunctioned and would occasionally burst fire. He was therefore in possession of an unregistered machine gun. The feds came after him and there was much dog murder across the land. He argued that he bough the gun thinking it was a regular AR15 and that he had no intention of making it fire automatically. In fact, he hardly ever shot the thing since he couldn't get it to work. The feds argued that it doesn't matter whether he knew he owned an unregistered machine gun. Instead, he was guilty because the relevant law was a strict liability law. Clarence Thomas and enough other Supremes rejected the gov's argument. In his opinion, Thomas basically said that, absent a clear statement that a criminal statute is to be judged according to some non-traditional version of mens rea, the court should assume a traditional mens rea element is required. Here, the statute in question doesn't expressly state that it's a strict liability statute and the evidence showed the gun owner didn't know he had a machine gun, ergo he didn't violate the statute. There's actually a lot of really important and fascinating details in this case that I don't have time to get into, such as the fact that it seems very obvious that the ATF lied through their teeth to get a conviction.

In every state I'm aware of, drug possession is a strict liability crime. In other words, legislatures have made anti-drug laws which announce that the mental state of the possessor is irrelevant. Where most statutes get into trouble is, as mentioned, the legislature drafts a statute that sounds an awful lot like a strict liability standard should apply, but they don't go far enough to make it obvious that a strict liability standard applies. As such, courts say, "Sorry, you need to alter the law to make it more clear that's what you're going for."

In the case this thread is based on, however, the court is doing something far more unusual. There is another longstanding constitutional criminal notion which says that strict liability laws cannot be imposed on non-conduct or a failure to act, in so may words. The seminal case for this involved a person who moved to LA and was required to register something or other within five days (I think it was that all felons had to notify the city that within five days of moving to LA, or something like that). They failed to do so, and SCOTUS basically said, "Okay, we totally agree that a person can be held strictly liable for doing stuff that is forbidden. But how the hell is someone supposed to know they can be held strictly liable for not doing something that they'd have no way to know is required?" The Washington court here is extending that logic to criminal drug possession by people who claim to not know they are possessing the drug. In other words, unknowing possession is analogous (according the Washington Supreme Court) to passive behavior. That is a novel interpretation.

In short, I'm not saying everyone here is wrong to disagree with the court. Quite the opposite. But I think it's folly to discuss technical matters in general terms and without appreciating the technical reasons a court arrived at some conclusion. Now, the above explanation leaves out many details that would fully flesh out the technicalities involved. But, generally speaking, it appears the Washington Supreme Court is exploiting the technical nuances in a way to address an issue that most other states have resolved in a far simpler manner by simply declaring that unknowing possession is not passive behavior or a failure to act, and therefore can be punished by a strict liability statute.




***It's arguably redundant to say "English common law," but I feel compelled to do so since people so often misunderstand what the common law is. It's not any law that is common, nor is it the mystical stuff that Sovereign Citizens invoke as a talisman. Rather, the common law is what we call the body of law developed by English judges as well as a system of creating law through judicial rulings.

A few things that needed to be addressed.

The alternative to the rule under discussion is that if somebody smuggles coke in baking soda boxes and you innocently buy one at the store, you are guilty of a felony even if the State agrees that you thought it was baking soda and had no reason to think otherwise. Likewise, if an acquaintance asks you to stop on your way home and drop off an opaque package and you do so, you're a felon if the package contains dope even if it is certain that you had no reason to suspect any crime was afoot.

Knowledge can proved by circumstantial evidence. In the second scenario, if you received the package at 8:00 and the police discover it at 8:15 stuffed in a boot, in a garbage bag, in a suitcase, your efforts to conceal it are likely sufficient evidence for a conviction. If the package was the suitcase, you couldn't and shouldn't be convicted under the new rule.

no officer, that's not my pistol in a holster on my belt. I don't know where that came from.

Officer: blow into this tube
me: fffwwwhhhhh
officer: hmmm .12 intoxicated
me: THATS NOT MY BREATH !!1!!1!

That’s not my dead hooker in the trunk of my car

Just further decay of society, we are getting closer to a third world shit hole each day.

The ruling is that in order to convict you of possession of contraband, the government must prove that you knew you possessed the substance and knew that it was contraband - IOW, that you knew you were breaking the law. You think that blocking criminal conviction for an unknowing violation of a malum prohibitum statute is devolution?

This.  Imagine you are going through airport security and they find a bag of coke in your carry-on that someone else slipped in there while you were standing in line at Cinnabon.  Should you go to jail for it?

Good!

Prosecutors should need to shit themselves once in a while. Perhaps it will cut down on misconduct & other acts of malfeasance?

Many people are so invested in the anti-drug hysteria that the purported goal justifies ANY means.

This defence already worked for the illegal that shot the woman in what was it California?