The New Yorkerのインスタグラム(newyorkermag) - 8月5日 07時01分

For more than 16 years, a group of legal scholars and advisers has been revising Washington, D.C.,’s century-old criminal code. This spring, at the very end of that process, the whole thing fell apart, explosively. “It was shocking to see it play out this way,” Jinwoo Park, the lawyer in charge of the effort, said. What went wrong?

In 2000, a law review evaluated the criminal codes of every state in the country, along with D.C. and the federal courts, on the basis of factors such as simplicity of language and specificity about punishment. The District ranked 49th. The legal definitions of many crimes, from assault to kidnapping to manslaughter, were muddy or entirely absent. Other aspects of the code were laughable, troubling, or often both. There were still statutes about steamboats and horses. One common-law offense barred people from being a “common scold,” which seemed to historically apply to unusually quarrelsome women. The punishment was to tie them to a ducking stool and toss them in a river.

By the time the revised code came up for a vote, in November, 2022, the D.C. council unanimously supported it. But in January, the council received word that Muriel Bowser, the District’s mayor, had chosen to veto the bill. “All the dominoes started to fall,” Park said. The bill became the subject of right-wing fearmongering and national outrage before getting struck down by Congress. The government workers behind the bill found themselves wondering: How could this happen? And how could we have been so naïve? At the link in our bio, Robert Samuels reports on how the attempt to modernize the District’s criminal code was “upended by the toxic mythmaking that has come to characterize national politics.” Photograph by Jordan Gale / Guardian / eyevine / Redux.

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