Former House speaker J. Dennis Hastert pleaded guilty Wednesday to bank fraud charges connected to $1.7 million he paid to cover up what federal officials said was sexual misconduct dating back to his years as a high school teacher and coach. Prosecutors are recommending up to 6-month prison sentence.[/quote]It's good to see that the GOP follows the principles of good and honest law-abiding citizens who only want to help themselves to some young men.[/QUOTE]
Settle down legal-eagle. He paid money to keep kids quite about his secret wrestling techniques. That's against the law. You may not like it. Hastert may not like it. He still broke the law. If it was such a bad law, he could have changed it during his time as Speaker of the House.
Um, that's not what he was charged with or what he plead guilty to. He was charged with structuring, and he plead guilty to structuring without having to acknowledge any reason for the structuring.
Structuring, if you're unaware, is the avoidance of required banking reporting of deposits of more than $10,000. It's a requirement of the bank that they must report to the IRS each and every transaction involving an amount of $10,000 or more. The issue is that it is a technical law, and does not require mens rea, or intent to break the law, to be found guilty of it. If you own a small business that does about $9k a day in business, and you make a deposit every day, you can be found guilty of structuring. Further, structuring allows for civil forfeiture, which is another horrid law also from the War on Drugs, that allows the government to seize the money in the accounts used for structuring without conviction or even pressing charges, and keep it with almost no recourse for getting it back.
Both of these laws make sense if you're looking to restricting the drug trade -- you want to catch people trying to wash their money through banks by avoiding the monitoring tripwires, and you don't want all that illegal money to be used as part of the defense or to continue illegal business during the court proceedings. However, as with every law that this broad, it ends up getting used against people that aren't doing anything wrong (the shop owner) and/or against people when you can't find anything actually illegal about what their doing (paying off an extortionist isn't illegal).
So, be educated, and bask in the knowledge that a crappy law was used to punish a man whose major crimes the system ignored. Truly a victory for law!