Good Law: The Seven Elements Of Crimes

Week Two Complete

1. According Bohm & Haley (2012), the seven elements of crime are harm, legality, actus reus, mens rea, causation, concurrence, and punishment. All seven elements must be committed in order for an act to be considered a crime. Harm is considered the external consequence required to make an action a crime. Legality is the requirement that harm must be legally forbidden for the behavior to be a crime and that the law must not be retroactive. Intentional or criminal negligent actions or interactions that cause harm are considered actus reus. A guilty state of mind or criminal intent is referred to as mens rea. Causation is criminal harm leading to harm without a long delay. With concurrence, the criminal act and the criminal

In order for a law to be considered a “good” law, it must be composed of five features. According to Bohm & Haley (2012), the five features are politically, specificity, regularity, uniformity, and penal sanction. Politicality refers to the legitimacy of the source. In other words, only violations of rules made by the state, the political jurisdiction that enacted the laws, are crimes (Bohm & Haley 2012). Specificity refers to the scope of criminal law, and should provide strict definitions of specific acts. Regularity is the applicability of the criminal and how it relates to all people regardless of social status. Uniformity is the way criminal laws should be enforced upon anyone who violates them, regardless of social status. The punishment or threat to punish violators of laws by the state is called penal sanction (Bohm & Haley 2012). According to the reading, Megan’s law could potentially be considered a “bad” law. Reason being is because it is not a uniform law and in order to be considered a good law, it must have all five characteristics. The Megan’s law is on the federal level and all states have it, however, some of the stipulations of the law vary from state to state. For example, some states limit their information sharing about registered sex offenders to a passive notification approach, which involves the posting of information on the state’s registry site (CSOM, 2017). Megan’s law can be perceived as a good law; however, it could use some tweaking. The law should be made uniform across the entire country so that all states will have the same rules, as it relates to sex offenders. Sex offending is a serious crime that entails of stiff punishments. There should not be any secrets kept when it comes to the status of a sex offender. The goal should be to keep other individuals from falling victim to these