Legal News

Is the Government Overreaching on Jared Loughner?

By Ashby Jones

Federal prosecutors in Arizona on Friday unveiled a superseding indictment against Jared Loughner, the man accused of shooting up a political event in Tucson in January.

The new charges included the murder of two U.S. employees and four others.

The 49-count indictment, which was unsealed Friday, supersedes an earlier indictment that didn’t include murder charges. The new charges against Loughner, 22 years old, could carry the death penalty. U.S. prosecutors said they were still weighing whether to seek the death penalty.

Click here for the WSJ story; here for the Washington Post story; here for coverage from the Arizona Republic.

Loughner pleaded not guilty to the earlier charges. A lawyer for Loughner didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Has the government gone too far with these charges? It’s an issue raised by Jonathan Adler over at the Volokh Conspiracy.

For starters, writes Adler, what’s the point to all this? He writes:

The federal government may have a legitimate interest in prosecuting the murder of federal officials, but it is not as if state prosecutors are unwilling or unable to make their own case against Loughner for his remaining crimes.  Does federal law offer the prospect of greater punishment?  It does not seem so.  The death penalty is available in Arizona, just as it is under federal law.  So it is not clear to me what purpose the additional indictments serve, other than to unnecessarily complicate what should be a relatively straight-forward case.

The additional charges largely hinge on the theory that the shootings occurred on protected federal ground, as if it happened in Congress, explains the WaPo.

But might the strategy be risky? Sources told the WaPo that it might be, that it could raise issues on appeal.

“They clearly have the congresswoman, her staff and a federal judge covered by federal law, and for everyone else they could prosecute him in state court,” said George Washington University law professor Stephen Saltzburg, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division of the Justice Department. “You don’t need to stretch it and try to argue that everyone was in a federally protected area. That is a really sweeping view of the federal law.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 07, 2011 (boomark / email).