I see this from time to time: “so-and-so was sent up the river on a morals charge”, or “you are disqualified if you have ever been convicted of a morals charge”. Do a search on “morals charge” and you get all kinds of stories about people arrested on morals charges but no explanation exactly those charges are.
Since immoral things are not necessarily illegal things, how can somebody be slapped with a morals charge without further explanation?
I am not a lawyer, but I used to work for the Office of the Immigration Judge (aka Immigration Court), where these sorts of things come up all the time (I personally saw hundreds and hundreds of cases involving these situations). I think the “morals charge” refers to a “crime involving moral turpitude,” but since nobody knows what the hell turpitude is, the TV folks stick to the sound-bite version. A crime involving moral turpitude (or CIMT, in the parlance) is an act which is not only illegal, but is generally considered to be morally reprehensible (i.e. rape and most other violent crimes, fraud) and is defined that way by statute and/or case law.
If there’s some wiggle room in an immigration case about whether a particular conviction constitutes a CIMT, the legal arguments about whether it does or doesn’t will generally be the determining factor in whether the offender gets deported (if he/she isn’t a U.S. citizen). If there are any immigration lawyers out there, please feel free to jump in with specifics–I have access to more research stuff at work than at gome on a Sunday morning, pre-caffeine–but the general trend in recent years has been that even if you’ve been a permanent resident since you were an infant, a CIMT conviction probably won’t save you from deportation. Laws are getting tougher all the time. And even if you don’t get deported, a CIMT can statutorily disqualify you from U.S. citizenship.
Also, for citizenship purposes, things which aren’t even a crime, either under U.S. law or the law of your home country can disqualify you at the INS examiner’s discretion. One friend of mine had to show that he was paying child support to his son from his first marriage back in Belarus, which was no small trick considering that he’s been doing it “under the table” because the government of Belarus takes a big chunk in taxes out of any wire transfers from abroad. It took him an extra 9 months or so to come up wuth documentation that satisfied the INS examiner.
In the popular press, I believe, “morals charge” is usually a euphemism for charges involving having sex with an underage person or hiring a prostitute.
Technically, a crime of moral turpitude might include any crime that involves dishonesty, abuse of office, malfeasance, in addition to the ones noted above.