> Everything is mask crime

> We talked last week about a hypothetical minimalist legal system with only two crimes: Wire fraud, for stuff you do in your house, and coronavirus-related curfew violations, for stuff you do outside your house. If you go to someone’s house and murder them, that’s violation of your local stay-at-home order and you can be arrested for that; who needs a law against murder? I wrote:

> > You’d need a regime of sentencing enhancements (leaving the house to do murder is worse than leaving the house to jaywalk), and you’d probably need like one more law for domestic violence, but the point is that you can get a pretty parsimonious legal system if that’s what you want. I do not actually think it’s what you want.

> The reason you shouldn’t want it is that any sort of minimalist legal system like this leaves huge room for discretion. If the only crime is a fairly common and trivial one like leaving the house, then the people who get prosecuted and severely punished for it might be the ones who leave the house to do murders, but they might not be. They might be people who leave the house and are otherwise disfavored by the police, prosecutors, judges and juries. Poor people, members of minorities, people with unpopular political beliefs, that sort of thing.

> Anyway a fun fact about New York state law (via public defender Sam Feldman) is that now:

> * It is illegal to be around people without a mask, and

> * It is illegal to be around people with a mask on.

> There’s an executive order requiring masks in public when you cannot social distance, and a state law forbidding them. So pretty much anyone who goes outside in New York is breaking the law. Presumably they won’t all be prosecuted.

He quotes https://twitter.com/srfeld/status/1251228271645208577 as the source.

edit: I can find it before June 2020 so maybe they repealed the ban right after they enacted the mandate?