Comment Re:Investigating if laws were broken (Score 1) 312
Ignorance of the law is not and has never been an excuse.
This is a legal principle that literally goes back to Greek antiquity.
And it today's America, it is also complete bullshit.
When your legal system has so many laws -- many of them not even enforced -- that law enforcement, whose job it is, can't even tell if something is illegal, then it is not reasonable to expect an average citizen to do the same.
And above all else, our laws are supposed to based on the "reasonable man" principle: what would a reasonable person do in those circumstances?
When a reasonable person cannot reasonably be expected to know the law, yet is unreasonably be expected to, and punished if they don't, another reasonable person might well conclude that this is a recipe for madness and anarchy.