One Nation Under Arrest: Criminalizing Unsatisfactory Hedge Pruning

Colleen Kaveney / May 14, 2010

How should a city treat one of its long-time, law-abiding citizens if her mature, decades-old hedges offend aggressive new standards set by city bureaucrats? What if this citizen is a 61-year-old grandmother fighting breast cancer? The answer the City of Palo Alto, California, provided to these questions was to send out two police officers to arrest Kay Leibrand in front of her home and neighbors and to charge her as a criminal.

As explained in One Nation Under Arrest, The Heritage Foundation’s new book on overcriminalization, this was an oppressive use of the power to prosecute and punish someone as a criminal – the greatest power any civilized government regularly uses against its own citizens. The City of Palo Alto had numerous other, less oppressive legal options available to it. More and more government officials, however, are using criminal punishment as a brute force weapon for “solving” every problem – regardless of whether that problem is serious or trivial or whether more appropriate and less oppressive options are available. (more…)