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Comment by brownbat | Hacker News Reader

It's a little more complex than that in practice.

Accessory liability generally requires you to know that someone is going to commit a crime, and know that your action will help them.

Juries can make bad decisions in particular cases of course, but if I were the defense I would have a field day constantly repeating the "I can't help you" quote.

The other side would try to say that was just hand waving or insincere, and the jury would have to decide between those two alternatives based on all the facts of the case.

(This becomes a question of fact because particular facts matter. If the Godfather leans in and says the line you gave, for instance, to one of his loyal henchmen, the law should be able to punish him.)

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> (This becomes a question of fact because particular facts matter. If the Godfather leans in and says the line you gave, for instance, to one of his loyal henchmen, the law should be able to punish him.)

That pretty much means that by calling someone a "godfather" I can prosecute them for things that normally wouldn't be a crime. What if I call someone a "terrorist," or a government a "regime"?

> What if I call someone a "terrorist," or a government a "regime"?

Apparently you can push a lot of people into believing a prosecution is not purely political.

Historically, that has been the modus operandi since, at least, the Truman Doctrine.

No one said said "calls" until your post...

I think the point is well made - the jury has to decide what "I can't help you" means, and it means different things depending on who says it. This is the nature of human communication and we can't escape from it.

If one actor threatens to kill another on stage as part of a play, then says exactly the same words in the same tone to the same person off stage, the former threat isn't real and the latter case is real.

That's because the threat isn't just the words; it's also a question of intent - and in the absence of time-travelling MRI machines to objectively observe people's thoughts in the past, inferring the intent from context we can observe.

Of course, you could argue that having laws that depend on people's only-indirectly-observable mental state is a bad idea - that announcing your intention to blow up an airport should either always be legal, or never be legal. If you're interested in such questions, you might enjoy reading about the Twitter Joke Trial [1] over one such incident.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Joke_Trial

To clarify further, generally past convictions are inadmissible, because you don't want to bias a jury about the facts of the specific case.

"This guy murdered three other people!" is no proof that he murdered this particular person.

Because of those rules, calling someone a "godfather" in court doesn't so much get you a prosecution as it gets you an objection and mistrial.

So I used a lazy example to illustrate the point.

But this brings up another key point -- most of criminal procedure can be summed up by "you can't use irrelevant statements to prejudice the hell out of the jury."

All in all a pretty good rule.

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