by Josh Siegel
@SiegelScribe

The Criminal Justice Committee was always an odd fit for Rep. Ed McBroom, a state lawmaker and dairy farmer representing a rural area of Michigan.
During his last term on the committee, McBroom, a Republican, was schooled on a criminal justice topic he had never heard of before, but on this one, few could blame him.
Rep. Rose Mary Robinson, a Democratic lawmaker and defense attorney from Detroit, would frequently want to know what the “mens rea” standards were for the state’s thousands of criminal laws and regulations.
“One day I said, ‘Rep. Robinson, I am not an attorney. I am a farmer. What on earth is mens rea?’” McBroom recalled.
Last month, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed into law a bill  written by McBroom, and supported by Robinson, that requires prosecutors—unless a law explicitly states otherwise—to prove that a defendant intended to commit a crime.
The willful intent standard, known as mens rea—which is Latin for “guilty mind,” as McBroom can now tell you—has suddenly become of central concern on Capitol Hill, as division over the issue threatens Congress’ efforts to pass a broader criminal justice reform bill.
At the federal level, opponents of requiring more laws to have a willful requirement standard argue that it would make it more difficult to prosecute corporations that commit fraud, taint food, or pollute the environment, because these violators could allege they didn’t intend to break the law.
Others fret over why Congress would risk ruining bipartisan momentum toward reducing harsh prison sentences from the nation’s war on drugs by injecting a seemingly unrelated, harder to understand issue—mens rea—into the same debate.
House Republicans not backing down from ‘criminal intent’ addition to prison reform debate
As federal legislators try to work out their differences, Michigan recently became the second Midwestern state, after Ohio in late 2014, to implement laws reforming how the mens rea standard is applied.
Proponents of mens rea, who call such requirements a necessary guard against overcriminalization by protecting people from accidentally breaking the law, say the states’ efforts prove that there’s a bipartisan way forward on the issue.
‘Common Sense’ in Michigan
“It was pretty commonsense around here,” McBroom told The Daily Signal of the effort he led to reform mens rea in Michigan, which he began at the end of 2014 and saw through until the legislation passed last month.
“After learning about it, I quickly realized that this word, this mens rea, is exactly describing the problem so many of us have been after. People can’t follow or keep up with all these regulatory burdens.”
McBroom, who was tending the cows on his farm in Dickinson County as he remembered this, added: “I happened to be at the right place at the right time.”
The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan think tank that advocates for “free market” policies, reports there are more than 3,100 criminal offenses in state statutes, along with other penalties created by regulatory agencies without legislative approval.
Mackinac, which testified in favor of McBroom’s bill alongside the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan, says that 26 percent of felonies and 59 percent of misdemeanors in the state lack an “adequate” mens rea provision, meaning a judge or jury doesn’t necessarily need to be convinced that the accused knew he was committing a crime.
In making its case, McBroom and Mackinac point to real-life examples where people were prosecuted, or threatened, for breaking laws they didn’t know existed. In a highly publicized case from 2009, Lisa Snyder, a stay-at-home mother who would routinely watch her neighbors’ kids before the school bus arrived, was warned by the Michigan Department of Human Services that she was engaging in illegal child care because she didn’t have a daycare provider’s license to supervise the children.
That law has since been changed. In another case, this one from 2003, a man named Kenneth Schumacher delivered scrap tires to what he believed to be a legal depository. But the facility lacked a license, and though he didn’t intend to break the state’s “strict liability” offense of unlawfully disposing of scrap tires, Schumacher was sentenced to 270 days in jail and a fine of $10,000.
Proponents of mens rea standards contend that judges sometimes interpret laws that are “silent” or weak on criminal intent as being a strict liability crime like this one, where a person can be convicted regardless of his or her state of mind.
Rather than go back and look at each criminal offense to see if it has a mens rea requirement, McBroom decided to require a default standard that would automatically apply to statutes that do not say anything about intent.
In order to win a conviction, prosecutors looking to punish people for such offenses must show that the defendant committed the crime with intent, knowledge, or recklessness.
The legislature still can make law that does not include a mens rea standard—making it a strict liability crime—by specifically saying that it intends for there to be no such requirement.
“This really goes to the fundamental tenets of criminal law,” said Mark P. Fancher, an attorney with the ACLU of Michigan’s Racial Justice Project.
“Law students are taught there is no crime if there is no concurrence between an act and their mental state,” Fancher told The Daily Signal. “In the absence of one of those things, then there is no crime. There is a reason why there is a heavy burden on the state to prove that someone has committed a crime. If someone is going to be held criminally liable, we want as a society for the state to provide sufficient evidence that proves people are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”
McBroom says that he was able to win over skeptical prosecutors by not including the criminal, motor vehicle, or public health codes in the legislation. For example, crimes like drunk driving and selling cigarettes or alcohol to a minor do not have an intent standard and were never a part of the discussion.
And prosecutors already must prove that defendants intended to commit crimes such as murder, robbery, and assault.
So McBroom’s legislation deals almost exclusively with laws related to regulatory actions.
“The message that resonated here, and is really missing at the federal level, is that we are not trying to get someone out of being guilty,” McBroom said. “We are just saying that unless otherwise stipulated, you can’t accidentally be a criminal. You can still face some civil penalties, but you are not a criminal. This mens rea issue is so critical to all of us just trying to live every day.”
‘Rescue’ Effort in Ohio
Bill Seitz, the state senator who made Ohio the first in the nation to adopt a default mens rea standard, approached the reform effort from a more familiar place.
A practicing lawyer since 1978 who’s serving the last of his 15 years in the Ohio General Assembly because of term limits, Seitz felt as though he was running out of time to address an issue that’s always irked him.
“Prosecutors are wed to the idea of making things as easy to prove as possible, so they like to have loose standards for mens rea; basically, it makes their jobs easier,” Seitz, a Republican, told The Daily Signal. “I would try to rescue these bills and put a standard in there, but I am not going to be there forever. So whether I am there or not, I figured it would probably be a good idea to have a clear call-out in the criminal code that you must specify the degree of mens rea.”

by Mary Holland
Global Research

(This article was first published by GR in February 2015).
On September 23, 2014, an Italian court in Milan awarded compensation to a boy for vaccine-induced autism. (See the Italian document here.) A childhood vaccine against six childhood diseases caused the boy’s permanent autism and brain damage.
While the Italian press has devoted considerable attention to this decision and its public health implications, the U.S. press has been silent.
Italy’s national vaccine injury compensation program
Like the U.S., Italy has a national vaccine injury compensation program to give some financial support to those people who are injured by compulsory and recommended vaccinations. The Italian infant plaintiff received three doses of GlaxoSmithKline’s Infanrix Hexa, a hexavalent vaccine administered in the first year of life. These doses occurred from March to October 2006. The vaccine is to protect children from polio, diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis B, pertussis and Haemophilus influenza type B. In addition to these antigens, however, the vaccine then contained thimerosal, the mercury-containing preservative, aluminum, an adjuvant, as well as other toxic ingredients. The child regressed into autism shortly after receiving the three doses.
When the parents presented their claim for compensation first to the Ministry of Health, as they were required to do, the Ministry rejected it. Therefore, the family sued the Ministry in a court of general jurisdiction, an option which does not exist in the same form in the U.S.
Court Decision: Mercury and aluminum in vaccine caused autism
Based on expert medical testimony, the court concluded that the child more likely than not suffered autism and brain damage because of the neurotoxic mercury, aluminum and his particular susceptibility from a genetic mutation. The Court also noted that Infanrix Hexa contained thimerosal, now banned in Italy because of its neurotoxicity, “in concentrations greatly exceeding the maximum recommended levels for infants weighing only a few kilograms.”
Presiding Judge Nicola Di Leo considered another piece of damning evidence: a 1271-page confidential GlaxoSmithKline report (now available on the Internet). This industry document provided ample evidence of adverse events from the vaccine, including five known cases of autism resulting from the vaccine’s administration during its clinical trials.
Italian government, not vaccine maker, pays for vaccine damages
As in many other developed countries, government, not industry, compensates families in the event of vaccine injury. Thus GSK’s apparent lack of concern for the vaccine’s adverse effects is notable and perhaps not surprising.
In the final assessment, the report states that:
“[t]he benefit/risk profile of Infanrix hexa continues to be favourable,” despite GSK’s acknowledgement that the vaccine causes side effects including “anaemia haemolytic autoimmune, thrombocytopenia, thrombocytopenic purpura, autoimmune thrombocytopenia, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, haemolytic anemia, cyanosis, injection site nodule, abcess and injection site abscess, Kawasaki’s disease, important neurological events (including encephalitis and encephalopathy), Henoch-Schonlein purpura, petechiae, purpura, haematochezia, allergic reactions (including anaphylactic and anaphylactoid reactions),” and death.
The Milan decision is sober, informed and well-reasoned. The Ministry of Health has stated that it has appealed the Court’s decision, but that appeal will likely take several years, and its outcome is uncertain.
Rimini: 2012 – Italian court rules MMR vaccine caused autism.
Two years earlier, on May 23, 2012, Judge Lucio Ardigo of an Italian court in Rimini presided over a similar judgment, finding that a different vaccine, the Measles-Mumps-Rubella vaccine (MMR), had caused a child’s autism. As in the Milan case, the Ministry of Health’s compensation program had denied compensation to the family, yet after a presentation of medical evidence, a court granted compensation. There, too, the Italian press covered the story; the U.S. press did not.
In that case, a 15-month old boy received his MMR vaccine on March 26, 2004. He then immediately developed bowel and eating problems and received an autism diagnosis with cognitive delay within a year. The court found that the boy had “been damaged by irreversible complications due to vaccination (with trivalent MMR).” The decision flew in the face of the conventional mainstream medical wisdom that an MMR-autism link has been “debunked.”
Italian court decisions break new ground in debate over vaccines and autism
Both these Italian court decisions break new ground in the roiling debate over vaccines and autism. These courts, like all courts, are intended to function as impartial, unbiased decision makers.
The courts’ decisions are striking because they not only find a vaccine-autism causal link, but they also overrule the decisions of Italy’s Ministry of Health. And taken together, the court decisions found that both the MMR and a hexavalent thimerosal- and aluminum-containing vaccine can trigger autism.
Italian court rulings contradict special U.S. vaccine court
These court decisions flatly contradict the decisions from the so-called U.S. vaccine court, the Court of Federal Claim’s Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. There, from 2007 to 2010, in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding, three decision makers, called Special Masters, found that vaccines did not cause autism in any of the six test cases, and one Special Master even went so far as to compare the theory of vaccine-induced autism to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
The Italian court decisions contrast starkly with these U.S. cases based on similar claims.
About the Author: Mary Holland is Research Scholar and Director of the Graduate Legal Skills Program at NYU Law School. She has published articles on vaccine law and policy, and is the co-editor of Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health and Our Children (Skyhorse Publishing, 2012).