But quarantine isn’t a punishment, nobody’s saying the person being quarantined has done anything wrong. It’s just that you’ve suddenly become extremely dangerous, and that means you have to change your behaviour quite extremely to avoid harming other people. That’s very inconvenient, sure, but nobody’s convenience gives them the right to put others in harms way.
I’m not a lawyer but criminal negligence is definitely a thing:
Quarantine actually is the same thing as imprisonment, because you can’t leave. You are deprived of liberty. The justification is different, but a justification and $3 would get you a coffee if Starbucks weren’t closed. The US Constitution was written with the understanding that politicians are prone to lying when convenient.
Negligence can be an element of a crime. You need a guilty act and some level of guilty mind (purpose, knowledge, recklessness, or negligence, in declining order of culpability). Walking around isn’t a guilty act. Homicide is a guilty act, but you’d have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant’s actions caused the death. It will be very hard to prove that the victim’s infection came from the defendant and not from any of the large number of other infectious people that are the defining feature of a pandemic.
Endangerment might work, depending on circumstances and jurisdiction, but I would expect courts to be skeptical. Walking around isn’t reckless or wanton, by conventional definitions.
Due process isn’t restricted to finding that a person has done anything wrong.
Frankly, I think that the government should simply shut down the courts for the duration of the emergency, enforce quarantine without regard to the law, and then claim sovereign immunity afterwards, while acknowledging that it had questionable constitutional authority to do so. The pretense of rule of law in US government has already been abandoned, we might as well get some practical use out of that before the revolution.
But quarantine isn’t a punishment, nobody’s saying the person being quarantined has done anything wrong. It’s just that you’ve suddenly become extremely dangerous, and that means you have to change your behaviour quite extremely to avoid harming other people. That’s very inconvenient, sure, but nobody’s convenience gives them the right to put others in harms way.
I’m not a lawyer but criminal negligence is definitely a thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_negligence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recklessness_(law)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endangerment
Quarantine actually is the same thing as imprisonment, because you can’t leave. You are deprived of liberty. The justification is different, but a justification and $3 would get you a coffee if Starbucks weren’t closed. The US Constitution was written with the understanding that politicians are prone to lying when convenient.
Negligence can be an element of a crime. You need a guilty act and some level of guilty mind (purpose, knowledge, recklessness, or negligence, in declining order of culpability). Walking around isn’t a guilty act. Homicide is a guilty act, but you’d have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant’s actions caused the death. It will be very hard to prove that the victim’s infection came from the defendant and not from any of the large number of other infectious people that are the defining feature of a pandemic.
Endangerment might work, depending on circumstances and jurisdiction, but I would expect courts to be skeptical. Walking around isn’t reckless or wanton, by conventional definitions.
Due process isn’t restricted to finding that a person has done anything wrong.
Frankly, I think that the government should simply shut down the courts for the duration of the emergency, enforce quarantine without regard to the law, and then claim sovereign immunity afterwards, while acknowledging that it had questionable constitutional authority to do so. The pretense of rule of law in US government has already been abandoned, we might as well get some practical use out of that before the revolution.