That's Absurd!

Assume you're a sheriff's deputy and you arrest a mail-carrier pursuant to an outstanding murder warrant.  Can you be charged criminally for "interfering with the delivery of the mail"?  What if you rescue a baby squirrel from certain death by giving it food and water -- are you guilty of a crime for "keeping a game quadruped" in your home?  What if you are convicted of a crime that has nothing to do with sex and isn't related to sex in any imaginable way -- can the government still make you register as a sex offender?  Technically, yes.  But a legal principle called "the absurdity doctrine" is supposed to protect you when statutes would otherwise produce an absurd result, like the ones discussed above.  Unfortunately, the doctrine doesn't always work.  Read about my proposed legal reform in The New Absurdity Doctrine, 125 Penn State Law Review __ (forthcoming, 2021).  Or read the abstract after the jump.

State legislatures often write incredibly broad criminal statutes. And the strict application of these statutes will sometimes produce absurd results. One such example is when a statute technically requires a defendant to register as a sex offender even though he was never convicted, or even accused, of a sex crime. 

In situations like that, the absurdity doctrine permits the court to disregard the plain language of the statute to avoid an absurd and unjust outcome. In theory, the absurdity doctrine has been approved in all states; in practice, however, it often fails to protect defendants from absurd results such as the one described above. 

One reason the absurdity doctrine fails is that, when applying it, courts often focus on legislative intent—an approach riddled with practical and theoretical problems. But divining the legislature’s intent should not be a prerequisite for using the absurdity doctrine. Rather, the doctrine actually serves as a check on the legislature, setting “boundaries or conditions on legislative power.” 

This Article therefore proposes a new formulation of the absurdity doctrine focused exclusively on case outcomes. Instead of straining to divine legislative intent, courts should simply decide whether—in light of “rule of law values” such as “reasonableness, rationality, and common sense”—the application of a criminal statute to a given case produces an absurd outcome. In sum, courts should simply strive “never [to] be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity.” 

This Article then applies the new absurdity doctrine to the real-life sex offender registration case discussed above, illustrating how it would have saved the defendant from the life-ruining registry. This Article also explains an important limitation that must be placed on the judiciary’s use of the absurdity doctrine.