Prosecutors Using Post-9/11 Laws To Prosecute Non-Terrorism Crimes

Federal and state prosecutors are applying anti-terrorism laws adopted after the 9/11 attacks to run-of-the-mill probes of political corruption, financial crimes and immigration fraud, according to a report by the Scripps Howard News Service.

According to the report, the Treasury Department has routinely used money-laundering provisions in the USA Patriot Act to scrutinize transactions in the private real estate market, casinos, storefront check-cashing stores and auto dealers. State prosecutors used a Virginia anti-terrorism statute making it a capital offense to be involved in more than one murder in a three-year period to sentence Washington-area snipers John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo. In addition, the FBI has deployed Patriot Act provisions in a political corruption probe involving a Las Vegas strip bar and the Justice Department reported to Congress last year that it used the new law in probes of credit-card fraud, theft from a bank account and a kidnapping.

In the first action of its kind, the Treasury Department this year also used the Patriot Act to put Syria's largest commercial bank and two commercial banks in Myanmar on blacklists, which effectively forbids any U.S. financial institutions from doing business with them.

Peter Swire, a law school professor at Ohio State University, said criminal statutes are often broadened as prosecutors stretch to find new ways to convict people accused of wrongdoing, as was the case with racketeering laws passed in 1970. Swire noted that many Patriot Act provisions were proposals that either the White House or Congress had previously rejected as overly intrusive, and many of them are slated to expire next year unless Congress makes the changes permanent. The Department of Justice has been vigorously campaigning to keep the controversial provisions.

The ACLU and other civil rights groups are urging Congress to terminate many of these provisions, arguing that the government already has sufficient investigative tools and the controversial Patriot Act measures unnecessarily expand government power.