Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the Court that "[w]ere we to adopt the Government's expansive interpretation of section 844(i), hardly a building in the land would fall outside the federal statute's domain." (Supreme Court Case; "Oyez Project -- Jones v. United States."
Trends and Conclusions -- in each case over the last two decades that has reached the Supreme Court with an element of arson attached, we note that it is the nature of the arson that seems to trip the balance from slightly serious to quite serious. The high court takes arson very seriously, likely due to a number of factors: arson can rapidly destroy property at all levels, not just the intended victim, but the community as a whole. Fighting arson is an expensive societal cost, involving many people who often risk their lives in the pursuit of taming the fire. So many other criminal activities, too, can be attached to arson: burglary, breaking and entering, assault, attempted murder, and murder itself. Thus, for the Supreme Court, the idea of arson is as a pentultimate crime.
In the United States, arson remains a serious problem, it is the primary cause of all fires, and annually kills or maims hundreds of people, injures thousands more, and causes over $5 billion in damage to property. For many years, though, the general population saw arson as an insurance crime -- a paper loss with limited impact on anyone other than the insured and insurance companies. but, for the fire and police personnel who have been injured or killed protecting the citizenship from arson, the toll is even more serious. In the 1990s, arson fires, for instance, were responsible for almost twenty percent of all fire deaths, making it the second leading cause of fire deaths and ranking only behind careless smoking habits as the most deadly causation of fire (Hall, 1996).
Within the governmental system, then, there is a hierarchy of what needs to happen to mitigate these arson losses -- to diminish the fires themselves as well as decrease property and human loss. At the local level, for instance,...
Such determination is the goal of any arson investigation. The advantages of accurate and thorough fire investigations should be obvious. All fifty states statutorily allow public investigations of all fires in an effort to determine their origins and causes. This process, however, is not without complications and, too often, the cause and origin are left as unresolved and identified as undetermined causes. Some fires are the result of complex events whose
Essay Topic Examples 1.The Psychological Profile of Arsonists: Unpacking the Motivations Behind Fire-Setting: This essay would explore the different psychological factors that can lead an individual to commit arson. It would examine various motivations such as desire for attention, revenge, financial gain, or satisfaction of pyromaniac impulses, and how they correlate with the profiles of convicted arsonists. 2.Arson as a Weapon of Environmental Terrorism: The focus of this essay would be on
These types of programs should provide refresher courses each year for the purpose of reminding firefighters what they should remember fighting and documenting the fire. The incendiary fire is one that is highly unpredictable because it does not follow the natural progression of a fire due to having been intentionally set and possibly accelerated with some type of flammable substance that may be highly toxic. The high incident of
Moreover, a prosecution of the core leadership of an organization under RICO charges is likely to produce revelations concerning the relationship between leadership and other members who are either guilty of racketeering or some lesser scope of individual crime. This is to say that RICO was essentially designed to push the door open on the activities of such typically obscured enterprises in order to systematically disrupt its initiatives and
Environmental Hazards as a Consequence of Crude Oil/Natural Gas Exploration, Transportation, Refining and Storage Ever since crude oil was first successfully drilled in the U.S. In Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, the demand for oil has only been increasing over the years in countries all over the world. (Camden, 1883) Crude oil, from which various petroleum products are obtained, is a naturally occurring hydrocarbon component found trapped in rocks below the
Insurance Fraud After tax evasion, insurance fraud is considered the highest-ranked among white-collar crimes. The original concept of insurance, as a for-profit endeavor, was to collect funds from a large number of people to pay for damages and accidents that involved a small percentage of the population that paid premiums. Insurance fraud is an ever-growing problem. Solving or eliminating this problem requires the resources and knowledge of individuals or associations with
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