A federal judge has refused to require a convicted tax evader to pay $100 million (that's $100,000,000.00) in restitution because the U.S. Department of Justice cited the wrong statute in his plea agreement!
Link to CNN Article
This is particularly troubling to me, as I am a teacher of legal writing. My colleagues and I spend a lot of time on the subject of proper legal citation. Admittedly, legal citation can be a daunting endeavor, as anyone who has ever tried to figure out where to find something in The Bluebook (the predominant legal style manual in the U.S.) will tell you. Legal Writing professors even created their own style manual, just to make citation a little easier. To make matters more complicated, the two manuals are not always in agreement as to proper citation form.
California complicates things even more; we have our own citation manual (popularly referred to as The Goldbook). Law students have a lot of stuff to learn about citation, and it can be a lifetime learning experience.
No matter how anal the law gets about this stuff, the purpose remains fairly simple: we follow the system in order to provide notice to interested parties of the legal authorities upon which their rights and obligations are based. As long as parties can find the authoriy, things are pretty much o.k.
But no amount of adherence to legal style can fix a citation if the writer simply cites the wrong authority. Precision will not repair inaccuracy; in fact, it can impede the reader's ability to detect the true authority.
Accuracy is particularly important in a plea agreement, because the Sixth Amendment (the DOJ seems to have only made it as far as the Fifth Amendment) requires that criminal defendants "be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation." That is, they need to be told which law applies to them.
No amount of citation style practice is going to fix simply citing the wrong law.
I certainly hope this fiasco is not a result of the Department of Justice packing its ranks with incompetent graduates of Regent University Law School.