Earlier this month, Gaskins was convicted in a Raleigh federal court for depositing money in a bank and faces prison for the rest of his life as a result. I am not kidding.

Gaskins, a Raleigh criminal defense lawyer, was convicted of dividing large sums of money into small deposits so that his bank would not fulfill an Internal Revenue Service requirement to report cash transactions of more than $10,000. The rule is intended to flag large sums of cash that might be tied to illegal activity.

I've edited this post several times now trying to decide what I think about this.

My initial reaction was shock. Its well known that deposits over $10,000 are investigated. The idea that it might be a crime to avoid provoking such an investigation when there is no underlying criminal activity is offensive to my view that the government ought to trust people generally unless they have some reason to suspect them of a crime. A life prison sentence for such an offense sounds positively insane.

Imagine if there were surveillance cameras on every street corner (which is increasingly true) and they were coupled with a rule that walking from place to place while intentionally avoiding their gaze was a crime punishable by long prison terms.

Imagine if telecommunications were often monitored (which is true) and there was a law against having a face to face conversation with the intent of avoiding government monitoring.

Would that be reasonable? Laws in general that require you to behave in such a way that government surveillance systems work?

This is the very definition of attaching the teeth to the fallacy that if you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear from surveillance.

Google searches pull up large numbers of announcements about successful convictions involving very large sums of money. Sentences vary - the prison terms are rarely anywhere near the maximum, so the claim of life imprisonment in this case is a red herring, but any prison term for the crime of attempting to avoid government surveillance is a bit questionable. Its not clear how many of these cases have a real relationship to some underlying crime. It seems that in many of the circumstances there is an overt suspicion on the part of the prosecutors and the court that drugs are involved, but there isn't any evidence.

OK, so the legislature has provided prosecutors with a tool that can be used to target criminals in certain cases where the underlying crime cannot be proven but there is a lot of smoke. Are we going to loose sleep about likely drug dealers getting short prison terms for structuring deposits? No (notwithstanding the fact that I don't think drugs should be illegal but thats beside the point and outside the scope of this discussion.) The danger with tools like that is that they can be applied in other contexts that they were not intended to be applied in. Its basically a matter of prosecutorial discretion.

What about this case? In this case we appear to know that there is no underlying crime. This guy is a defense attorney - a successful one. He may not go to prison, but as a result of this conviction he will be disbarred - he won't be defending any more criminals.

The fact that a long prison sentence is unlikely means this is less of a blatent miscarriage of justice that I thought it was to begin with, although the judge certainly has it within his discretion to throw the book at him.

Whats troubling about this case is that its easy to see the motive for an over-zealous prosecutor who is burned about loosing cases to this guy and has forgotten that effective criminal defense is a requirement for justice in an adversarial legal system (and one usually lacking). Is that the story here?

But, on the other hand, maybe there is some sort of underlying corruption going on here, which the prosecutor is aware of but cannot prove and does not want to mention.

I find it troubling when the legislature creates meta-laws and meta-crimes which allow the justice system to veer toward being based upon the private judgments of men rather than upon facts that can be proven.

“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." - Richelou

Johnny Gaskins and the End of Law by William L. Anderson