I’ve often heard federal judge’s in our district court’s say that they tire of the “guns and drug” cases that predominate their dockets. Now, Justice Scalia, the AP reports, has added his voice to that concern. At the American Bar Association meeting in New Orleans Saturday afternoon, Justice Scalia worried that the Supreme Court is becoming a court of criminal appeals, commenting that “I think there’s too much routine criminal stuff that has been pouring into the federal courts that should have been left to the state courts.” Scalia attributed the trend to “nickel and dime” criminal cases clogging the dockets from the district courts to the Supreme Court.
Of course, we’ve seen an astonishing explosion of federal criminal laws in the last 30 years. Last summer the Wall Street Journal published an article detailing the sweeping breadth of the nation’s federal criminal laws, estimated to be somewhere in the range of 4,500 in number. Of course, I think I’ve mentioned a couple of my favorites in the past: the “Smokey the Bear” violation (18 U.S.C. 711 (seriously, look it up)), which makes it a federal crime to make unauthorized use of the Smokey the Bear character. And, of course, why wouldn’t that be a federal criminal violation for anyone to be so brazen to take those unlawful acts (by the way, I’d throw up a photo of the good bear here, but don’t want the Forest Service to track me down for prosecution). A distant second: interstate transportation of stolen dentures (18 U.S.C. 1821). So, at some point we reap the whirlwind of this ridiculousness, but for now, our federal courts have become too much like our state courts, prosecuting cases that are best left to the everyday grist of the state court mill.