With all the abortion bans there are efforts to punish women who leave their home state and travel to another state to get a legal abortion. So if you’re from a state like Texas and you fly to California to get an abortion, you can be prosecuted back in Texas.
Are there legal precedents for this kind of situation? For example if marijuana is illegal in your state but legal in another state, can Nebraska punish you for getting high in colorado for example?
Can you be prosecuted for leaving your home state and doing something which is illegal in your home state, but legal in the state where you actually do it?
IANAL, but my understanding is that typically you cannot be prosecuted criminally by a state government for actions that happen in another state.
That is why these new laws typically have two features: 1) they allow for civil suits against citizens for participating in a certain action (procuring an abortion, for example) rather than criminal penalties and 2) they are being expanded to include actions like “aiding a woman in crossing state lines to procure an abortion”.
Let’s open that can of worms and talk about war crimes.
We prosecute a Nazi for killing people in his death camp. And he says “Not guilty. I killed those people in Germany and it was legal under German laws at the time.”
I’m not sure if you purposely picked that example, but war crimes fall under Universal Jurisdiction meaning that any state/country can prosecute someone accused of said crime. It’s like that specifically to keep people from being able to wriggle out of a conviction by residing in another jurisdiction (typically where you won’t or can’t be extradited).
I think a better example would be a diplomat committing a crime abroad and being prosecuted in their home country (based on their home country’s laws?).
It’s fascinating, in the sense of horrifying and disgusting and hypocritical, that the loudest states’ right states are now passing laws trying to get around the legal decisions made by other states while at the same time using the legal system to fight against laws legitimately passed by Congress that apply equally to all states.
To be clear, “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” are not statute offenses but are considered extrajurisdictional crimes that are tried under the ad hoc ‘universal jurisdiction’ of a tribunal such as the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg , the subsequent Nuremberg Military Tribunals, the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal, International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, International Criminal Court, et cetera. The ‘crimes’ in these trials are not statute crimes but are generally considered offenses against the accepted traditions of war (such as minimizing civilian casualties), genocidal campaigns, military violations of Westphalian sovereignty, international treaty violations, et cetera that do not fall within any one sovereign jurisdiction and are conducted almost exclusively by the victors of a conflict to punish the vanquished. I cannot recall a single instance where a nation state has voluntarily presented itself or members thereof for judgements by such tribunal or accepted the consequences of judgment without external pressure, and of course many states (including the United States) have famously refused to extradite officials accused of war crimes or crimes against humanity.
States of the United States federal system have explicitly defined jurisdictions per the Constitution and one state cannot generally prosecute actions that take place in another state unless they can demonstrate that the crime had direct effects within their own jurisdiction, in which case they apply for extradition. The federal government, on the other hand, oversees all states in terms of interactions between them (except for explicit interstate compacts) , and may prosecute for crimes that have occurred anywhere (and in many cases even outside the borders of the United States). Simply put, a state cannot regulate the activities of another state or the actions of its citizen outside of its boundaries unless it has a compact with the state in which a crime occurred, and even then it would be very easy to make a jurisdictional challenge. The notion that a state can arbitrarily prohibit that one of its citizens from undergoing a medical procedure in another state where that procedure is legal is patently absurd, and the fact that it is the same people who are otherwise fervent supporters of “states’ rights” in every other context tells you everything you need to know about their motivations in this matter.
< hans gruber>You ask for spectacles, @Exapno_Mapcase, I give you the G-O-P.</ hans gruber>
All good answers, but typically states can get around extra-territory restrictions by defining the crime as that which happened in their own jurisdiction. To use the thread example, a state could pass the law as leaving the state with the intent to obtain an abortion which would be illegal in the home state.
Then the elements, the intent, the leaving would not have occurred in another state, but all of the criminal acts would have occurred in the home state where the home state has jurisdiction.
You can’t be prosecuted for ‘intent’ to commit an action that is not a crime within the jurisdiction that said intent occurs; that would be a legal paradox, not withstanding the difficulty in establishing such intent to the standard of criminal conviction without evidence of conspiracy, which again is not a thing if the supposed ‘crime’ being conspired is not actually a violation within the jurisdiction it is being alleged to occur within. Nor can states prohibit travel between them even to prevent a presumptive crime. In fact, there is no possible way such laws can be considered as legitimate under the Constitutional framework regardless of how many people vote for them. Only the federal government can regulate interactions between states and the actions of individuals across state borders.
There is a federal law which makes it illegal to travel to foreign countries with the intent to have sex with underaged children, even if such sexual activity is legal in the other country. It’s not thought crime at all. Many statutes penalize intent, such as possession of drugs with the intent to sell them; that is punished more harshly than mere personal possession and no court has held that to be thought crime.
This is demonstrably untrue. If while in the state of WV, I plan a murder to occur entirely within PA, WV can punish my conduct even if none of the murderous acts occur within WV. The fact that murder is also illegal in PA makes no legal significant difference as my planning harmed the people of WV.
Why can it not? It is punishing activity which is occurring in WV. The legality of it in the other state means nothing. The home state is prosecuting the intent to commit an action, which has a long history in law.
You agree with my murder example, yet somehow say that WV is bound by what PA decides on that issue. That cannot be correct. WV is harmed by the violation of its own standards which do not depend on the vagaries of what the PA legislature decides.
UV seems obviously right here. Back to the abortion thing, a state could criminalize conspiracy to commit abortion or something, but that would leave out a woman planning on her own, I guess.
How would it work, though? “Assault with intent to murder” is a crime, but could they nail you with “travelling to another state”? Are there any documented examples of this sort of thing?
Are there documented cases of one state prosecuting for, say, conspiracy to commit murder in their state even though the murder happened in an other state?
They aren’t nailing you with traveling to another state, they are nailing you with planning a murder (or an abortion), regardless of where the action occurred.
“Conspiracy” inherently involves action of planning to commit a crime. It is not a crime to cross state borders, it is not a crime to receive medical procedures or treatments even if they are not permitted in the person-in-question’s state of residence, and a state has no jurisdiction over actions occurring in the jurisdiction of another state. You cannot be lawfully arrested or tried for conspiracy to commit something that is not a crime in the jurisdiction in which it occurs and is not in violation with some explicit compact between states.
The tangent about the federal government making it illegal to travel oversees to commit crimes like sexual assault of minors is not pertinent; it has already been established that the federal government does have jurisdiction over the actions of citizens even outside of its national borders and US-controlled territories. However, this is explicitly not true of state governments which only have jurisdiction within their borders, and even that can be subverted by federal authority in many cases.