I point to two legislative solutions that are ready at hand. Third, legislators may be equally surprised at how statutes are being applied, indicating how difficult it is to successfully draft a modern statute for a classic malum in se crime. Second, public expectations are frustrated, and the rule of law damaged, when the law surprisingly classifies crime that looks like one offense, like shoplifting, as an intuitively distinct offense, like burglary. First, people may be charged with burglary for minor conduct that would otherwise be a misdemeanor, producing excessive and disproportionate sentences that violate the internal logic of a criminal code that ranks crimes and indexes punishments to crimes based on that ranking. Several costs result from poorly drafted statutes that sweep in conduct that looks nothing like what a common person would recognize as burglary. As journalists and defense practitioners have documented, prosecutors in some states have been charging repeat shoplifters with burglary, on the theory that, having been banned for life from a certain chain store for shoplifting in the past, they committed burglary by entering with the rest of the public and shoplifting again years later. These loosely written burglary statutes can work significant injustices and are responsible for counterintuitive real-world prosecutions that would be laughable were the consequences for criminal defendants not so dire. Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.I will show that the definition of burglary in modern state criminal codes deviates significantly from the ordinary idea of what burglary is and what makes it wrong. Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms. If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior.
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