Comment by iamnothere
8 hours ago
I don’t believe this is the case, every now and then we see prosecutors using an obsolete unenforced law or an unexpected edge case of some law to come after people.
A great example is the CFAA. It has been judicially narrowed after court battles, because in its original form it was overbroad and criminalized basic, common things. Prosecutors abused it in order to get political wins until they were finally stopped.
This is unfortunately fairly common. Legislators either push for too much or don’t understand how the law might be applied, and innocent people suffer until someone wins a big expensive set of appeals.
Edit: I realize now you may be talking about the UK in particular, in which case you don’t even get this shoddy level of protection as “Parliament is sovereign” (lol).
I'm talking about the specific law that was being discussed, and the particular other law I used as an example. And the protection mentioned was the one of double jeopardy which had also been explicitly mentioned.
Double jeopardy was partially eliminated in the UK in 2003 for qualifying offenses. I don’t think this has been tested, but during a retrial, a refusal to provide a password would be a separate RIPA offense from any refusal during the first trial. So you could actually be jailed more than once for this. For qualifying offenses all that is required for a retrial is “new and compelling evidence” which is a low hurdle for politically unpopular defendants.
If that did happen you'd have a good case from the Human Rights Act because it becomes indefinite imprisonment. The UK is still following the ECHR as well.
But arguing these theoretical untested-because-they-never-happen edge cases isn't exactly pushing forward a good case for this law having been "badly written." There's seemingly no problem with it in practice.