Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman asked, "Does it matter if it's impossible to commit this crime?" Assistant District Attorney Karla Lato responded in her brief that since other people who harm a fetus, causing post-natal death, can be convicted of manslaughter, why not the pregnant woman herself?
But suppose that a tenacious skeptic raises the following objection: the timing argument relies on the two crimes that I called the "later" crimes; but one of these two later crimes, the crime of refusing to compensate Tom and Beulah for their enslavement, seems impossible to commit unless the first crime of slavery was already committed.
In fact, the ATF concoction of the fictitious stash house sting operation is a striking example of how far the government can go in creating crimes, offering lavish inducements to unsuspecting persons, writing a script for them to follow, directing them on how to commit the phony crime and then arresting them for something that was impossible to commit but for the government's involvement.
The new federal transportation bill, for example, authorized funding for a program that seeks to prevent the crime of drunken driving not by raising public consciousness or issuing stiffer punishments — but by making the crime practically impossible to commit.
You can often fix the error and check in a new revision, but sometimes a particularly bad error in the administrative file makes it impossible to commit new revisions.
Although public opinion made it impossible to commit more troops, Nixon was still confident he could end the war with a favourable settlement.
Again, despite the ubiquity of digital devices, the interplay of fire diffused by smoke seemed impossible to commit to video.
"By definition, it is logically impossible to commit a firearm homicide or firearm suicide without using a firearm," Kleck told the Los Angeles Times.
