The U.S. Code contains almost 5,000 federal crimes, impossible for any reasonable person to memorize. So what happens if somebody accidentally breaks a law that they didn’t even realize was a law? Two bills, if passed, would clarify that criminal intent is required to prosecute people for most federal crimes. Though it may sound simple, some opponents believe the bill’s sponsors may have a more sinister ulterior motive.

What is mens rea?

Mens rea is a Latin phrase meaning “guilty mind.” It is one of several mental states the law recognizes, including recklessness or criminal negligence. For some crimes, no intent is needed in order to prosecute — for example, a drunk driver can still be prosecuted for vehicular manslaughter, even though the driver didn’t “intend” to kill anybody. But for most crimes, federal criminal law doesn’t provide a clear requirement of whether or not criminal intent in order to prosecute. As a result, people have been convicted of crimes they would have no reasonable idea existed, such as transporting a woodpecker.

That’s what the bills introduced by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI5) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) aim to clarify. Under these bills — H.R. 4002, the Criminal Code Improvement Act, and S. 2298 the Mens Rea Reform Act — the default standard would become mens rea. In other words, a person would only be convicted of transporting a woodpecker if they knew it was illegal and were deliberately breaking the law. (The Supreme Court has already instructed courts to apply this standard of criminal intent for federal criminal statutes without the requisite mental state, but these bills would codify that ruling into law.)

Who benefits from a change?

However, the effort to codify this concept through legislation has run into opposition from many Democrats. Bill Keller, editor-in-chief of the criminal justice-focused Marshall Project, and until recently the executive editor of The New York Times, wrote, “[Many] on the left seem suspicious that the mens rea push is mostly a pro-business ploy designed to undermine costly regulatory laws (like environmental and food safety laws) and eliminate the concept of ‘strict liability’ that corporations have been protesting for decades.”

The Department of Justice (DoJ) has echoed the same sentiment. Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell, chief of the DoJ’s criminal division, said, “It’s quite challenging to prove that very senior corporate executives were aware of criminal conduct that was going on within their corporations. But … they may have consciously avoided knowing facts, and under the current law, intent can be satisfied by willful blindness.”

But proponents of these bills use the same example of corporate malfeasance to bolster their assertion that reform is necessary. “The Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act imposes criminal penalties, including short jail sentences, on companies and individual executives of companies that sell contaminated food or drugs. The law requires that a supervisor prevent violations, even if he is unaware of them,” said Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA).

Legislative outlook

Complicating the issue, criminal justice reform — which both parties agree may be one of the only issues where there is enough common ground to pass meaningful legislation in 2016 — will not receive a vote in the House unless it contains mens rea reform, vows House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Goodlatte. The House bill was reported out of the House Judiciary Committee in November, and the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the bill last week.