Organized Crime: Challenge to the American Legal System. Part II. The Legal Weapons: Their Actual and Potential Usefulness in Law Enforcement (original) (raw)
The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science
Mr. Johnson is a Special Attorney in the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the United States Department of Justice.* After receiving his J.D. degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1960, Mr. Johnson became a Ford Foundation Fellow in Criminal Law at the Northwestern University School of Law, where he received his LL.M. degree in 1961. This article is the second of three installments, the first of which appeared in Volume 53, Number 4 of the Journal, at page 399. This series of articles is based upon a thesis which the author prepared while a graduate student at the Northwestern University School of Law. Mr. Johnson's first installment contained an assessment of the effects of organized crime on American society and an analysis of the factors which have made organized crime difficult to suppress through traditional methods of law enforcement. The second installment summarizes the various legal countermeasures available to an honest prosecutor-particularly a local prosecutor-in combating organized crime. These measures involve techniques designed to weaken criminal organizations through convicting their leaders, reducing their profits, and denying them access to services and facilities necessary to their illegal enterprises. The third installment will be a survey of the legal countermeasures available to minimize the effects of political corruption upon the prosecutive effort against organized crime. This survey will encompass means for substituting another prosecutive agency where the local prosecutor is corrupt or ineffectual, sanctions to discourage a corrupt official from improper acts, methods of minimizihg the effects of improper acts when they do occur, and techniques to maximize the effect of an honest official where others in the law enforcement machinery appear to be under the control of organized crime.-EDIToR. '3 The factors which render organization leaders virtually immune from prosecution for organization activities are summarized in Part I of this series, 53
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