Federal criminal law and its enforcement (American casebook series)

The first four chapters introduce the special characteristics of the Federal Criminal Law and trace its growth through expanding jurisdictional elements as well as increased substantive coverage while posing the challenging question of how to deal with the dissonance between a very broad criminal law authority and very limited resources. Specific crimes and criminal enforcement areas are again treated, each in its own separate chapter, and the federalism themes treated at the beginning of the volume are reduxed in the final chapter on duplicative state and federal crime prosecutions. Six new chapters have been added. A new overview chapter on Official Corruption takes an integrated look at the federal criminal statutes dealing with that subject, and another new overview chapter compares all of the federal offenses dealing with group and organizational crime including RICO, CCE, the Travel Act, the Gambling Business statute and the new Continuing Financial Crimes enterprise statute. These new overview chapters develop broad themes common to these different crime categories which are difficult to address adequately in any of the individual crime chapters. This edition also adds new chapters dealing with Official Bribery, Conspiracy, the Sentencing Guidelines (including the November 1992 amendments), and Forfeiture. In addition, it builds the material on the Hobbs Act into a separate chapter as well as adding an important new section on Bank Fraud to the Mail Fraud chapter. Existing chapters dealing with Mail Fraud, RICO, Drug Offenses, Money Laundering, False Statements and Civil Rights have also been substantially revised and expanded to emphasize new cases, statutory changes and current enforcement strategies. The chapter on Drug Offenses, reflecting the enormous increase in federal drug prosecutions, has been expanded to include materials on the federal penalty scheme for drug offenses; the extraterritorial application of the drug laws; and the impact of federal drug prosecution on the operations of the federal court system. The Mail Fraud chapter examines the Supreme Court's decisions in the McNally and the Carpenter cases and considers the implications of those cases in light of the enactment of 18 U.S.C. 1346. The RICO chapter presents new cases dealing with the enterprise and pattern requirements as well as an expanded section on Civil RICO. The Civil Rights chapter adds a section on excessive force in arrests, allowing consideration of cases like the prosecution of the police officers in the Rodney King case, and the False Statements chapter now includes the Poindexter decision as well as other new cases. Finally, like the earlier volume, the second edition includes extensive material from the United States Attorney's Manual, including the prosecutorial guidelines on RICO, drug enforcement, money laundering, mail fraud and forfeiture. Legislative proposals for reform of the different areas of the federal criminal law are also sprinkled throughout the book. The materials are intended to be taught in a two or three hour (semester) second or third year course, or in a first year second semester criminal law offering following a traditional, introductory first semester course in Criminal Law.