Today’s shooting was a likely terror attack. It appeared to have a political motive. It was violent. It aimed to shake the public’s confidence in basic security. But the shooter didn’t fit the preeminent narrative of terrorism.
Is terror a status offense? In other words, if two identical acts of terror are committed, one by a 66-year-old white man, and one committed by a 22-year-old Muslim, are we able to condemn them both as terror attacks without differentiating the status of the attacker?
Our Constitutional framers were deeply concerned about “status” crimes. A status crime makes a person's status the core element of an offense, not his conduct.
Therefore, they categorically outlawed all “bills of attainder.”
That refers to an act of a legislature declaring a person or group of persons guilty of some crime and punishing them.
We’ve had them in the past. During the height of anti-Communist passions, Congress enacted a labor law. In United States v. Brown, 381 U.S. 437 (1965), the Supreme Court invalidated the section of the labor statute that criminalized a former communist serving on a union’s executive board. Brown was convicted because he was a Communist and a labor leader.
We’re not at that point of labeling a group of people as terrorists; but the stark differences in responses to the recent Manchester and London attacks, compared to the attack on our American lawmakers, suggests that we might see attainders in the future.
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