Home Opinion GUEST EDITORIAL: State lawbooks need pruning, not fertilizing

GUEST EDITORIAL: State lawbooks need pruning, not fertilizing

When a fresh two-year General Assembly term starts Jan. 1, new and returning legislators will take their oaths of office and begin drafting a blizzard of bills.

Republicans, eager to test their ability to override Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto after regaining a Senate supermajority and falling one vote shy in the House, will be emboldened to pursue conservative policy goals. Democrats will play defense but seek to score points by striking deals. Freshman lawmakers will hunger to show they can bring home the bacon while Jones Street veterans reap the rewards of seniority.

For the legislature, we offer a modest proposal: Subtract two pages from the N.C. General Statutes for every page you add.

University of North Carolina School of Government professor Jessica Smith, author of the thousand-plus-page scholarly compendium “North Carolina Crimes,” made the correct call four years ago: It’s time for the General Assembly to clean up its tangled mess of a criminal code.

“There’s no central database for collecting criminal ordinances,” Smith told the John Locke Foundation think tank’s Carolina Journal newspaper in May 2018. “It’s impossible to say how many things we’ve made criminal in North Carolina.”

The statute books are bloated with bad laws — some are redundant, others are unconstitutional and a few are overly specific, evidencing favorable treatment given to special interests.

For an example of the latter, consider the laws on larceny, or common theft. Swiping most personal property valued at less than $1,000 is a Class 1 misdemeanor. But larceny of pine straw is a more serious matter. Steal so much as a handful of spindly brown pine needles where a posted sign warns against it and you could face a Class H felony.

This distinction, we’re sure, was a carve-out for the state’s forestry industry. We realize pine straw is a commercial crop, but for every homeowner who buys it by the bagful as garden filler, another rakes it up with dead leaves and considers it compost. Should taxpayers really foot the bill to incarcerate people for pilfering pine straw instead of assessing them a fine?

In 2015, the General Assembly finally got around to repealing a law that banned the use of profanity on public roads or highways — more than three years after a judge struck it down as a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech. Yet a close cousin of that code banning the use of “any words or language of a profane, vulgar, lewd, lascivious or indecent character, nature or connotation” on the telephone remains in force.

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First adopted in 1913, the phone profanity law is plainly unconstitutional. Yet so long as it’s on the books, police can still arrest you for breaking it, and you may incur attorney fees and court costs to have the unlawful charge thrown out.

Speaking of free speech, a campaign advertising law that makes false statements a crime could be dusted off to derail Attorney General Josh Stein’s gubernatorial ambitions. A fellow Democrat, Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman, is likely to seek an indictment against Stein if federal courts lift an injunction imposed after the AG sued to block a potential prosecution.

The statute conflicts with long-settled precedent granting political speech the highest degree of protection and preventing government from appointing itself a universal arbiter of truth. It won’t survive a First Amendment challenge, so why is it still in force?

Professor Smith suggests a recodification process — rewriting North Carolina’s criminal code from soup to nuts. By sheer necessity, that would greatly reduce the number of individual laws, benefiting both the state’s judicial system and its residents.

No legal scholar, let alone an ordinary person, could commit our state’s thicket of criminal laws to memory. When people don’t know the law, they can’t ever be certain their conduct is lawful. Confusion and fear take the place of confidence and freedom.

Legislators have a golden opportunity. Instead of passing new laws to weigh down the already sagging statute books, they should turn their efforts to consolidating the laws we already have.

Call it addition by subtraction. Since recodification would require a lengthy bill, the honorables can still take credit for passing something.

Published by The Wilson Times on Dec. 8, 2022. Portions of this editorial were previously published in June 2018.



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