Indiana Columnist Quotes Lysander Spooner
Debbie Harbeson in the July 7th New Albany News & Tribune:
Let’s say you — or someone you care about — had a few drinks one night and, knowing it would not be a good idea to drive, decided to let a sober person take the wheel.
Did you realize you can still be charged with a criminal offense? It’s true. The Indiana Supreme Court just affirmed this in Moore v. State.
. . .
Indiana’s public intoxication law is horrendously vague and depends upon the arbitrary discretion of law enforcement, which means it is open to possible abuse.
Worst of all, this law makes criminals of peaceful people who are not harming others. Lysander Spooner made an excellent case way back in the 1870s when he said “vices are not crimes.” He writes, “Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another.”
When a law exists that can rightly be interpreted to say that one can commit a criminal offense even while sleeping in the passenger seat of a car, clearly we have a problem.
Harbeson blames the law rather than the Indiana Supreme Court for this ridiculous result, but her assumption that Indiana’s public intoxication law “can rightly be interpreted” to say what the Indiana Supreme Court in Moore said it says is misguided. In fact, in this post I quoted something else Lysander Spooner wrote to explain why the Indiana Supreme Court’s decision in Moore is as wrong as it smells.
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In other Spooner-related news, Randy Barnett, the proprietor of lysanderspooner.org, further shores up his mainstream conservative Republican bona fides in a post at the Volokh Conspiracy expressing gratitude for “capitalism” and “the rich.” The attitudes of Spooner himself were very different.
But hey, I still have to give Randy props for lysanderspooner.org, where you can read Vices Are Not Crimes.
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