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Heritage
Foundation
A
Jail Sentence for Selling Hot Dogs?
Evan
Bernick
May
23, 2014
It
should be obvious that throwing people in jail for selling hot dogs
is profoundly un-American. But in the state of North Carolina, it
could happen to you.
In
fact, it has already happened. In 2011, a judge sentenced Steven
Pruner to 45 days in the custody of Durham County’s sheriff. His
sin? Selling dogs from a food cart near Duke University Medical
Center.
In
case you’re wondering, no, Pruner’s dogs didn’t make anyone
sick. But Pruner sold food without a license. And, under North
Carolina law, that’s enough to make you a criminal. Pruner was
charged with, and convicted of, operating a business without a
license. His sentence of 45 days in jail was suspended and he was
placed on 12 months of unsupervised probation.
Why
do North Carolina’s citizens put up with this nonsense? Most of
them probably don’t even know about it. According to a recent issue
brief from the Manhattan Institute, entire sections of North
Carolina’s regulatory code, even those dealing with public health,
“make the violation of any of their provisions criminal.” Worse,
certain provisions of the code don’t require individuals to know or
understand that their actions are wrong. The fact that most
reasonable North Carolinians wouldn’t expect selling hot dogs to be
something that the criminal law has anything to say about doesn’t
matter.
We’ve
written about the explosion of federal criminal laws over the past
few decades, and the swelling of the federal register beyond any
ordinary citizen’s capacity to make their way through it, let alone
understand it. We’ve also written about how many of these laws
don’t target activities that are inherently wrong, or require that
people be aware that those activities are illegal before they can be
punished—even if most reasonable people wouldn’t expect them to
be illegal. Such laws make a mockery of the Constitution’s due
process guarantees, which, as the U.S. Supreme Court stated in Bouie
v. City of Columbia (1964), provide that the criminal law “must
give warning of the conduct it makes a crime.” Fair notice was
central to the Framers’ understanding of the rule of law.
But
it’s important to remember that states can abuse the criminal law
as well. The constitutional requirement of fair notice binds
government at all levels.
Using
the criminal law in this way isn’t just petty and stupid. It’s
unjust and quite possibly unconstitutional. The Framers knew better
than to allow politicians this kind of leeway to jail citizens.
Unlicensed hot dog hawking isn’t something that anyone should have
to worry about being locked up for, at least without fair notice that
it is a crime. It’s time for North Carolina policymakers to free
their states’ frankfurter vendors...
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