Criminal justice reform tends to focus on sentences and recidivism. Those are important, but reform should also focus on something else – the issue of mens rea. That’s a Latin phrase meaning “guilty mind,” and the principle is simple. A crime must involve criminal intent.

In recent years, state and federal governments have written laws that neglect that principle.

“The news is replete with stories of Americans who have been convicted of crimes – and sometimes sent to prison – when they had no intent to break the law,” write Congressman Bob Goodlatte and Sen. Orrin Hatch in Politico. “For example, a 23-year-old man who found a buried skull on a hunting trip in Alaska and turned it over to the U.S. Forest Service was charged with removing an archaeological resource from public lands. Similarly, the parents of a young girl who saved a woodpecker from the family cat were fined for violating the Migratory Bird Act because it is a crime to take or transport a woodpecker.”

It’s a symptom of overcriminalization.

“Over the past several decades, the failure of Congress to articulate a clear standard of criminal intent, or mens rea – the state of mind the government must prove a defendant had when committing a crime – coupled with the dramatic expansion of the federal criminal code, has resulted in a body of law that no average American citizen could be expected to read and understand, let alone conform his or her conduct to,” Goodlatte and Hatch write. “The U.S. Code currently contains nearly 5,000 federal crimes… In addition to statutory criminal offenses, there are thousands of federal regulations that, if violated, can also result in criminal liability. Many of these laws and regulations impose criminal penalties on people who have no idea they are violating a law.”

That’s why the lawmakers have introduced bills in their respective chambers to enforce a mens rea standard in federal prosecutions.

“The purpose of the bills is to ensure that Congress does not erode the important protections criminal intent requirements provide,” they write. “Criminal intent requirements ensure that honest, hard-working Americans do not become criminals because they accidentally do something unlawful or violate an obscure law.”

Attorney Harvey Silverglate wrote a book titled “Three Felonies a Day,” which explains why mens rea is important.

“As a civil liberties matter, a government which has the ability to prosecute innocent citizens at will, is a government which has achieved the power that has characterized all tyrannical governments throughout history,” Silverglate contends.

The White House is against reforming mens rea requirements, on the grounds that reform might make it harder to prosecute corporations for illegal dumping, committing fraud or neglecting food safety rules. A Justice Department spokesperson claims, “Countless defendants who caused harm would escape criminal liability by arguing that they did not know their conduct was illegal.”

Well, what of it? The tradeoff is a reasonable one – a few guilty people might escape punishment, but many more innocents won’t face unjust prosecution.

Congress must support Goodlatte’s and Hatch’s bills.