Lame-duck Congress' rush for criminal justice reform plan will hurt, not help: Tom Cotton Congress must reform our criminal code, include mens rea as an element of most crimes, and strengthen the sentences for dangerous drug crimes.

Tom Cotton | Opinion contributor

Lame-duck sessions of Congress rarely produce good legislation. Legislators are least accountable now, with many not returning next year. And they’re counting on voters tuning out after the election for the holidays. Nowhere is this more true than with so called “criminal-justice reform,” which is just a misguided effort to let serious felons out of prison.

Here’s what genuine criminal-justice reform would do: reduce arbitrary government power over lives and protect us from the drug epidemic ravaging our community. Congress can take three simple steps to achieve these goals.

First, we need to clean out the federal criminal code. Today, no one even knows for sure how many federal crimes are on the books. One estimate found between 10,000 and 300,000 regulations that can be enforced criminally, in addition to the more than 5,000 federal criminal laws.

Many of those federal crimes would be funny, if they weren’t so dangerous to our liberty. For example, there’s a federal law against selling “Turkey Ham” as “Ham Turkey.” Think such laws are never enforced? Think again. Gibson Guitars was prosecuted under a century-old law at a cost of millions of dollars to the taxpayers and the company because it allegedly transported wood in a way that may have violated laws of India. We should scrub the federal criminal code and remove such outdated and arbitrary laws. And we should create a transparent database of this shorter, more concise criminal code.

You don't have to know you did anything wrong

Second, many federal crimes do not require mens rea, or a “guilty mind.” Mens rea, a common element of most state crimes, means that the offender must have a certain state of mental culpability to be charged with the crime. Coupled with the vast and confusing criminal code, the lack of mens rea leaves Americans at risk of arbitrary prosecution for trivial conduct. Senator Orrin Hatch has been a champion for mens rea reform to ensure that, at a minimum, a defendant should have known his conduct was wrong before facing criminal charges. Congress should incorporate these concepts into criminal-justice legislation.

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Third, the federal criminal code hasn’t kept up with the opioid crisis, allowing the epidemic to spread across the country. For example, current law doesn’t reflect the potency of fentanyl, a highly lethal opioid responsible for killing tens of thousands of Americans each year. A trafficker can carry enough fentanyl to kill 5,000 Americans before the lowest mandatory minimum sentence applies, and these traffickers receive a mere five-year sentence for distributing enough poison to kill more Americans than died on 9/11.

Current legislation doesn't solve the problem

Unfortunately, the legislation moving through Congress includes no mens rea reform, no reduction in the criminal code, and no crackdown on deadly drug traffickers. Astonishingly, the bill goes soft on some of the worst crimes — trafficking heroin and fentanyl — by allowing most traffickers to spend up to a third of their sentence at home, where many of them will no doubt return to dealing drugs.

At this point, it’s best for Congress to pause on criminal-justice legislation and take the time to reform our criminal code, include mens rea as an element of most crimes, and strengthen the sentences for dangerous drug crimes. Congress can also focus on how to rehabilitate felons to help them get off on the right foot after serving their sentence. What Congress ought not do is rush through flawed legislation in a lame-duck session. Unaccountable politicians and those who live behind armed guards may be willing to gamble with your life — but why should you?

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Committee on the Budget, Joint Economic Committee and Select Committee on Intelligence. Follow him on Twitter: @SenTomCotton